Jaron Smedes van den Berg’s (1996) artistic practice promotes a non-dual approach to digitality. In his work, he rejects restrictive dichotomies such as analog-digital, natural-technological, and spiritual-material.
By engaging with a wide range of machine-based techniques—such as weaving, pen plotting, 3D printing, and laser cutting—and exploring their outermost boundaries, he traces the edges of our co-emergent digital and analog surroundings. The works that result from these explorations read as visual essays examining digital processes through their analog manifestations, and vice versa.
Rather than viewing the analog world as separate from the digital, he regards the two as polarities. Polarities here are not separate entities, but interdependent structures that are continuously reproduced. These opposites need each other as they bring each other into existence.
This metaphysical reconceptualization of digitality is, at its core, an educational task, which is all the more relevant in this rapidly shifting technological landscape.
