Gregory A. McCullough

Based in Ridgeway, Ontario, within the Great lakes watershed, McCullough's art bridges the digital and classical divides. Seeking gems "found in translation", his art re-embodies the visual vocabulary of one medium within another. He seeks to express art as a way of knowing (embodying the visual vocabulary we see the world through) which can then reveal our paradigms of knowing, even those subsumed from technologies usage.

Trained classically in Industrial Design and Fine Arts (Humber and Concordia University) he juxtaposes this with his training in Digital Animation (Icarus) and decades of creating 3D synthetic environments for Air Traffic Controller and Pilot training simulators (Adacel and CAE). His art celebrates retelling of the - "this is how we know of the world now."

From the Artist... If one views Art and Technology as structural components in a social “Generative Adversarial Network” than artistic endeavors offer a positive evolutionary progress to society. Technology is the McLuhanesque medium that ultimately modifies its users. “Every way of being, becomes a way of knowing.”  We become slaved to how the technology is used day to day, and our view of the world is reshaped to this new mold. This shifts our society without pre-planning- we adapt to our new environment. We unknowingly are changed.

I see Art as the counter-leverage to this technological social shift. It embodies an “Every way of knowing becomes a way of being”. It allows us to test run other paradigms of being, encouraging us to see the world anew; and so, to in turn change ourselves via the enlightenment of seeing what we have or shall become. We can see outside of ourselves within a cultural mirror, and accept or reject what we have inadvertently become. Hence we can choose what we are to be.

These two adversarial shifts – accommodation to technology and a cultural conscious revealing agency; move civilization forward. Like skating, both contribute and counterbalance each others tendency's as we come into being. Arts ‘purpose’ fulfills this social function through its’ holding a mirror up to culture’s aspects. I see arts role as elucidating and illuminating our current paradigms of being, so to open them up to a self critique. Hence the “content” of art is boundless. Yet obviously an artist must have a focus. Mine seems to reside in the translation of seeing from one medium to another.  Instead of grasping at what is ‘lost in translation’, my art explores and celebrates the ‘Found in translation’.

For though technology may have convinced us humanity is a ‘tool maker’, I firmly hold that we are exceptional ‘paradigm jumpers’.  That what makes us most unique, what underlies our comedy; sports; literature; music; play; cinema; games; academia; scientific breakthroughs; et al; is our innate ability to temporarily construe other paradigms of being, and then bring their lessons back to this common reality. So it’s this found in translation that my art works seeks to embody, regardless of their subject matter, -their disparate paradigm of being.

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