This particular Venus is based on a painting by Cranach the Elder, who was himself a friend of Martin Luther (who’s moral outrage at the corrupt Catholic Church led to a new branch of Christianity).

I have denied my Venus her beauty by replacing her head with a skull. A reminder that all of us are born condemned to die, that corporality is always hiding just beneath our skin. For those who believe in an ‘afterlife’, how we conduct ourselves inside our fleshy vessels impacts greatly on what happens after death.

I have placed the painting in a frame of my own construction, embedded with other signifiers of childhood moral gameplay; marbles, toy soldiers and cowboys & indians and other drossy ephemera.

Cranach painted many religious and mythological subjects throughout his career, which I intend to investigate through a series of paintings – of which this is the first – viewing the contemporary world through the moral lens of the 15th Century Master.

With such growth comes inevitable redundancy – the state-of-the-art gadget you crave today will be left to gather dust in the back of a drawer in a couple of years time. It’s easy to lose sight of this rate of change, in fact, that we don’t just take it for granted, but actively expect smaller, faster, more feature-filled devices to replace the ones we found miraculous just a few months ago.

4-colour spray stencil on DEC Hi-Note Laptop

I tried to estimate how many (now worthless) transistors this device contains:

• CPU – 486DX = approx 1 million
• Screen (800×600, colour) = 800×600x3= 1,440,000
• RAM (24MB) = 24×1024x1024×8 = 243,793,920
• Supporting chipset = approx 0.5M

This rough calculation suggests there are nearly 250 million transistors in this device alone. As you can see, the device has an ‘Intel inside’ sticker – After leaving Caltech, Gordon Moore went on to found the Intel Corporation, and now has an estimated personal worth of $3.7B …

This turned out to be quite an undertaking, involving participation from twenty one artists, actors and roboticists. I am pleased to say the evening went without major incident, and the cats spoke through the night from 7pm to 1am, imparting words of wisdom to hundreds of visitors.

I’ll be uploading more information on the development of this idea over on thefortunecats.com over the next few weeks, in the meantime here’s a film of the cats in situ.

There have been twenty nine aesthetic experiments completed since January, mainly, though not exclusively, in the medium of painting. As is to be expected of the experimental method, some have been more successful than others. Overall, however, I feel this years work marks a solid contribution to the field of aesthetic mischief.

The year started with a series of studies of human pathogens. Along the way, there were some scientists and philosophers, a fair few portraits of my reprobate friends, an instructional video and a metaphysical plaything.

Most notably, personally, was the opening, and unfortunate closing of shardcorner
which provided a brief opportunity to subvert the consciousness of complete strangers with my tiny-shop-window-by-the-traffic-lights. A most worthwhile experiment, and one that bears repeating.

2007 will see shardcore exhibiting as an ‘official’ member of Brighton Artists Open Houses in May – expect a frenzy of experimentation in 2007 as I attempt to fill my house to overflowing with arcane exercises in pareidolia.

Summary of analysis, big up to the Max Ernst massive.

“To what extent can truth endure incorporation? That is the question; that is the experiment” – Nietzsche

An executive toy for the modern natural philosopher.