Hangouts: John Patterson

John Patterson

John combines intuitive narrative explorations with found material as visual and textual accompaniments. Found material can include anything from quick phone pics, interviews, critical texts, etc. He does this with the intention of re-contextualizing the understandings, memories, and translations of personal experiences.

At the DIS Summer Institute, John is working on two sculptures, Serious Theatre and How to be Important. They are his first explorations on video/audio sculpture using audio and text fragments of online content, from figures and platforms that have identified themselves as "free-thinkers" and vehicles of self-help and innovation. John specifically refers to alt-right figures such as University of Toronto philosophy professor Jordan Peterson, and author-philosopher Sam Harris.  These two people are blatantly ignorant, use aggressive speech tactics, but are given large platforms to spread discriminatory rhetoric. John has voiced his concern about the trend of these people being given these platforms because of their profit over their wisdom (for more reading about this, John recommends Tim Wu's writing). For those wondering, Jordan Peterson is the guy who doesn't believe in using the words "they/them/theirs/etc" because believes that not using a gendered pronoun is an attack on traditional gender roles and that he is being oppressed by trans people and other marginalized folks. John mentions TEDx and the growing number of people that would consider themselves "experts at life". He is particularly interested in the TED Talk™ structure that relies on ambiguity and abstract word grouping. John refers to this as a kind of "riddle". John says, "I became interested in the first part (the riddle) because it generates very strange quotes, usually kind of existential or something."

John specifically wants to respond to folks like Jordan Peterson who describes his political alignment as, "free market libertarian social-Darwinist right" and reimagines these so-called intellects as non-sense speaking sculptural objects. They intersect with his interest in vehicles of self-help, from the old school, corny self-help/motivational speaker to the poorly informed or willfully ignorant critiques of social "thinking", it's hard not to compare the two.  Both of these occupations prey on people's self worth, lack of access to better information, and perceptions of reality, and their desperation. To John, these people embody hypocrisy with their actions, and lack any sense of responsibility.

At the Summer Institute, John knew that he wanted to work in real physical space with tangible materials. In looking for materials, he knew that he wanted to build with intention. John was building a structure for weird quotes, texts, and audio he was compiling and came across garden trellises. He wanted to build a steal cage, however he was able to do what he wanted to with the the trellis. The trellis acted as a skeleton adjacent form for holding the the content and other found objects.  He said he wanted the sculptures to feel like independent actors that were performing in the space with scripts John had written for them. To John, these structures were their own characters adjacent to lo-fi animatronic performers reading cryptic and strange texts taken from problematic sources.

The summer institute was great and John had a good time :^D

Thanks John!

Sun Sign: Cancer ? maybe a Pisces? definitely a water sign

John Patterson in studio