Ibiza

Ibiza is about the Sublime. It depicts a piece of a pixellated sky crashing into the Mediterranean.

Let me explain ...

The Romantic Era

In the 18th Century, the philosophy of the Enlightenment seemed secure: all of humanity's problems could be solved by reason and rational scientific analysis. Science would deliver us from our hardships, and there would be no longer any need or reason to suffer from what was seen as the frailties of human nature, e.g., religious belief. (Perhaps there are parallels to today's scientific hegemony? How many times have we been told how computers will make our lives so much easier?).

However, in the late 18th, early 19th century the Romantic movement arose which challenged this rational viewpoint. The Romantics realised that if mankind adopted a purely rational approach then it would stand to lose some of the aspects of humanity that we value the most: creativity, emotion, compassion. People started to seek deeper spiritual satisfaction. In the creative arts the Romantics concentrated on the areas which the Enlightenment tried to pretend did not exist: the untamed forces of nature, the representation of the infinite, and the expression of human emotion.

It's all a bit like Star Trek, really. Mr. Spock belonged to the Enlightenment - all logic and no emotion, and Dr. McCoy was the Romantic, spending every episode berating Spock for his coldness. Identify the Star Trek reference in Ibiza: The Movie.

Ibiza: The Movie

I have created a short animation: Ibiza: The Movie is available for download in AVI format (click here), or QuickTime format (click here).

The Sublime

The goal of the Romantic artists was to find ways to express the full range of human emotions. This is a difficult task for a painting to achieve. You can paint a tree, but how can you paint "fear" or "awe"? They felt this was possible by creating images of a peculiarly evocative quality, for example, wild and romantic mountains. This awe-inspiring quality introduced the concept of the Sublime.

"What we can conceive of - the infinitely great, for instance - but is not in our power to represent, exactly defines the Sublime."
- R. Appignanesi and C. Garratt, Introducing Postmodernism

For this reason, Sublime pictures tended not to be "beautiful" in the conventional sense of the word, but would tend to be of scenes which inspired the strongest emotions, such as sorrow, terror, anguish, and despair: "A sense of sublimity was induced by those objects whose properties seemed repellent, such as excessive size, darkness, or infinite extension" [2].

Sublime pictures sometimes had terrible storms, shipwrecks, "impending rocks, dark caverns, and impetuous cataracts rushing down the mountains from all sides". The idea was to frighten the viewer, to generate what we would now call a "gut reaction" [1]:

People would queue up to get a buzz out of John Martin's fantasy pictures of cataclysmic scenes "like a modern spectacular or science-fiction film". They were the disaster flicks of their day:

Ibiza: The Picture

Ibiza shows a typically sublime Mediterranean scene (actually, the beach does exist. You break your neck getting down to it). By making the sky an important element of the picture I am trying to emphasize that part of the Sublime that refers to physical vastness, boundlessness, and cataclysmic events (I've stayed clear of the bad weather aspects - I'm not into bad weather). However, the picture is well aware of the impossibility of representing infinity in a picture.

My 3D computer modelling package tells me I can create a "sky" at the click of a mouse. Well, I'm telling it it can't. Like with most things to do with computers, don't believe the hype. It's a finite, pixellated sky. The fact that the computer-generated sky is merely an array of square coloured pixels is emphasized by bringing one of the pixels down to earth in typically cataclysmic fashion (the one-pixel-wide hole in the sky is also visible).

So is it impossible to represent concepts such as "infinity" and human emotions in a picture? Well, some dodgy French philosophers have suggested that this is precisely the purpose of modern art - to represent the unrepresentable [5]. They suggested that this can be achieved through abstraction - crude iconography: "You see that red squiggle there? That's me being happy, that is. And that blue blob? That's me being angry." This theory has resulted in the proliferation of abstract paintings this century, such as monochrome paintings: squares of a single colour.

One of the main monochrome men was Yves Klein. Klein was fluent in two languages: French, and Art Bollocks. "Blue has no dimensions, it is beyond dimensions, whereas the other colours are not". Klein chose a blue square to represent the sky. Well, I can tell you that not even a PC software company would attempt to represent the wonders of the sky by a crude icon like a blue square on the menu bar. The crashing pixel in Ibiza bears an unfortunate resemblance to a Klein monochrome:

Conclusion

Well, I mean, either you can represent something or you can't. And isn't it more interesting to accept and explore the limitations of painting rather than to pretend that such limitations do not exist? That's what Ibiza is really about: the limits of pictorial representation. Don't be fooled: science doesn't have all the answers.