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Artist(s)
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Geneva Hinkson
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Artist Statement
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"Path Dependency" is the third piece in a series of collaborative artmaking between students in DMS 230: Climate Interventions: Performing Arts + New Media. Through a rapid-response format, the first collaborator produced a piece of art in response to a collected climatic story; the second collaborator responded to the first art piece in another media; the third collaborator responded to the second art piece in a different media without seeing the first art piece. "Path Dependency" was produced through this process of creative telephone. It is a tryptic that remixes Flemish painter Hieronomous Bosch's triptych "The Garden of Earthly Delights" along with lines from Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, and photos of climatic warming passed through a psychedelic "Apocalypse" filter. Bosh's triptych depicts heaven, earth, and hell in his signature zany style, both instructing and inspiring viewers to consider the implications of their choices. The bi-directional arrows and their path from apocalypse to utopia may be read as progress, regress, or a stuttering synthesis between advancement and setback. This piece plays with humanity's varied predictive models for the future--religion, fever-dreams, science, literature--and highlights the power of path dependency in our decision making-processes.
