The discussion of artificial realism is of course limited by government secrets and the inability to establish whether or not there are "Other beings" involved with the non-human ambitions of technology.
Do we comb each hair according to a technological chant that will later inform high frequency interpreters? Are there different departments of order that correspond to each other but not to any other department? Are there mechanical elves inside us patrolling the outer antipodes of our beliefs and perceptions? (sitting on the edge of the arena, cheering in a frenzy with eyes spiraling in a black hole, leaving no traces, just a semi-transparent geometric web of motion with each wave of the hand.)
Could I be the court painter for an Alien King?
Do the faceless people in my paintings exist as fractions of humanity?
When I said 10 years ago that "Monet's brain was the haystack and the rest of the painting was his body," 10 years later I may have found that "the needle in the haystack" was an artificial second-self, known as the juggler, a Jack-in-the-box dummy who's strings extend beyond visibility.
Abstraction once came from nature (nature = abstraction + art) then it transformed to artificiality through a man-made process, just as an abstract shape such as a found object, man-made, resembling abstractly a form recognizable in nature was abstracted into a non-abstract object. Meaning one reality‹a bicycle seat and handle bars became a bull's head. Trading reality dialects. The non-abstract object became the basis for a new level of perception. The reformed meaning of abstraction, thus preconditioning the mind to understand that various concrete objects are not attached to their parts alone.
Jump 48 years.
Artificial realism is created now by the tape loops in "I am the Walrus" just before the lyric "Sitting in an English garden . . .," a fragment of classical music from an old gramophone. This is created specifically to artificially represent old classical music in a David Tuder Stockhavsen Œfound music' manner. (John Cage)
Yet Lennon consciously composed this piece of "simulated found music," not real found music or "ready-made music."
Bicycle to bull Picasso
Dismantling one reality and constructing another from the same parts.
Cow to Black & White Abstraction Mondrian
Reverse effect is attained my mondrian; at that point it became a new basis for seeing art‹when the nature if abstraction came from subtraction
Bicycle‹BullMan made to nature‹PicassoNature to man made‹MondrianCow‹B/W Squares
(The conditions of the mind for what later can be called "Artificial" Realism.)
When the post-object abstraction or the pre-naturalist phase of turning an abstraction back into nature is reached. It is perhaps that nature becomes "itself" in art. Nature does not exist in art.
Therefore all art is an abstraction even when attempting to be representational.
Art must then refer only to art in order to express the "Reality" or "Nature" of art and be art.
Today, what is most "real" in a painting is perhaps only a comparison to how real a similar Thing or state of being is in another painting. Then a line of the Figure is compared not to the Figure itself but to the line found in all other renderings of the Figure. The projection of the Soul found in the line. After its descriptive function has been attained.
We can then say that Artificial is not a negative term when applied to realism. Because of the questionable "content of being" in any given object or subject.
Therefore an artificial representation of reality, may not exist.
Its absence is the very limit of its existence. Somewhere in the mind or corporeal world, the touchable real world independent of perception. The mind reassembles or looks for a source in our artificial world for that which was once considered real.
(The invisibility of form. The extent, that art is derived from nature.)?
Then the art work falls like a drop of water in the ocean. Into the realm of its greater family of all the art ever made by man, and it releases again only to art itself within this flow that moves both forwards and backwards. The continuum of visual material has its first initial time, then its external time‹time of its presence and its existence, though possibly absent.
Then "to be on time," as they say, or even "ahead of its own time," one must analyze closely the release of the "initial time" period element before it has dissolved.
What I have created is the state in which the image time presenting of another reality superimposed in a field of another simultaneous presence‹or a conjunctive new hyper-reality or hybrid image showing these simultaneous presences is allowed to exist.
The answer is, of course, to create a unified presence of all presences, to define the object which is both real and artificial and to liberate it from invisibility. That is the artist's job.