My First Post - New Media Artist

Hello Everyone,

My name is Marc Balvoy and would like to take this opportunity to introduce myself. I'm a new media artist originally from Manchester, living and working in London.

I heard about the Steemit community a couple of weeks ago and I am encouraged by the interaction that benefits everyone engaged in the content. My intention is to share the progress of my work and look to interact with people who have similar interests.

About my work:

We are entering an increasingly connected world, one which operates at a faster rate suggesting today’s generation are moving away from linear thinking. My work seeks to explore the movement of exponential growth in technology and how this affects us on a biological and spiritual level, focusing on the underlying patterns of our reality.

Today, living as an artist the increase in technological activity seemed an attribute I could not ignore in the content of my work. As with any new technology, there is a resistance until it eventually becomes engraved into our culture from a position of convenience and efficiency. I did not want to use technology to solely express my work so I looked for ways to create a balance between handmade and digital techniques to respect this relationship between adaptation over time.

A technique I looked at was creating a piece of work by hand using clay and molding it in carbon fiber using traditional methods. This would then be scanned using a 3d scanner to record the spatial 3d coordinates of the piece and then upload it into a virtual environment. I felt this process would make a strong link between the art of the real and virtual world.

Additionally, to this process, I searched for an underlying philosophy to add substance to the content of my work. I found this by thinking about what everything in existence is physically made out of, which led me to Ernest Rutherford’s work that the atom is mostly made of empty space with charges resonating at high velocity. Adding on to this, I saw there was a fractal nature at different levels of reality in a Fibonacci sequence from DNA, plants, anatomy, weather patterns and the shape of galaxies. These theories act as the source material and create the foundation of my work, more specifically the underlying self-organizing process, allowing energy to flow and develop in nature.

I have experimented several years now on how to project these theories into a coherent body of work with an individual aesthetic. I gradually developed the work to possess a 2.5 dimension in a canvas form. This would allow me to produce contours within the piece to suggest the movement of energy transforming from one form into another.
I am increasingly fascinated with Self Organising Systems and aim to translate current theories into a body of work over the next three years. The process of order forming from an initially disordered system, without any external influence, is truly remarkable and, is one I can use to develop my work further. This has made me consider bringing some figurative elements into my work, some pieces reflecting the thousands of billions of chemical reactions per second that take place in the human body on a subconscious level.

I believe we are on the cusp of where virtual reality will become a necessity in our everyday lives as 2D platforms have been over the last 14 years. There are benefits and drawbacks, but with regards to my art, it is the perfect tool for anyone with access to a head device to see my work anywhere around the world with great accuracy.

By 3D scanning my work I can place it into a virtual space and with the use of PBR (Physically Based Rendering) materials an individual would have an extremely similar experience as being at a physical gallery. There will be huge advantages in a virtual shared space to sell, buy and network, removing many of the inconveniences such as the cost of time, travel and pollution.

Over the last several years I have been keeping an eye on a group of VR social platforms breaking through with great promise and so, I believe, there is going to be a huge surgency of activity in all market sectors in the next 3-5 years. The realism of the 3D geometry is here. The coding industry is growing to supply interactivity and domestic computers are becoming powerful enough to generate these environments at an affordable price point.

More images of my work: www.instagram.com/balvoy

Thank you for your time and I look forward to posting more in the near future.