Emergence

Drew Harkey

skip to footer navigation

Emergence, from the latin emergere ‘bring to light,’ is a gallery of analog and new media works, with a selection of paintings, digital art, electronic music, photography and interactive code. Current projects include: The Luminous Aether, a digital art collection of aleatoric abstractions made with the assist of generative algorithms; Edge of Chaos, a musical expedition into the psybient realm of quantum complexity; and Artistic Nature, a photography project which explores patterns and coincidental semantics found in nature. Selections of the portfolio were exhibited at LeMoyne Arts, and was curated to emphasize the fragility of our remaining wild places.

Music

Edge of Chaos is a psyambient study in the psychoacoustics of sound. Consider it in-flight music to Alpha Centauri.

Poised in that narrow band between the repetitive and the unpredictable is music — that peculiar ordering of sound in time — something we experience as different from random noise. Down there, at the level of quantum strings, everything is completely sound. Music can be an analogue, an ontological wormhole, a portal into the liminal space between the duality of structure and waves — reaching through the mirror of our consciousness itself and the fantastical possibilities of our creative mind. From strings above, to strings below.

Imagery

The imagery in this art project is organized into three presentational galleries: nature photography, digital art and a personal photo album of photographs from my private collection.

Nature Photography

The photo essay of nature photography called Artistic Nature is a collection of photographs taken outdoors, in nature and wild places, where the peculiarity of geometrical and organized natural structures lends an impression of nature as artist. Nature is ever changing. Never more so than today. Many of the photographs in this photo essay preserves not only a sublime moment in the woods, but also serve as a voice for those same wild places that no longer exist.

Digital Art

The second portfolio is a digital art collection called Luminous Aether. Luminous Aether is a portfolio of digital art images and fractal designs. Some are abstract images of lightbeams and some are fractal art works, or digital art created with the assistance of mathematical algorithms. Fractal art, also known as electronic art, is computer-assisted art, and the works in this collection are created by a real human artist using a computer program the creates flame fractals. The resulting digital paintings (or cybernetic art works, as some call it) resemble ethereal digital landscapes that I like to think analogize the concepts of the quantum and imaginal realm.

Photo Essays

The third and final art gallery in the imagery section of the digital media project is more of an accidental art work. Using photographs from my personal photo album, Upon Further Reflection, in the photo gallery I explore scientific, psychological and philosophical concepts reflected in the various photographs I have in my personal album. It is interesting how the reality we perceive depends on how we observe it — and how structure of the world “out there” — as it is reflected back at us through the interpretive functions of our consciousness — may be only an allegory of the strange loops, recursions and self-mirroring that underly it all.

Painting

In the world of psychoacoustics, gradience is where emotion is most heightened: in the tension between parts of the brain involved in processing music that are otherwise used for other functions. To further my understanding of gradience, I studied the properties of color through painting — to help me visualize the concept of wavelengths as tone.

Drew Harkey