binx newton
digital photographic manipulations

binx is an architect to live, but lives for art. 
He has focused on the  social construction of reality through digital montage, web-based interfaces, and installations. 
He is a photo taker and an imager faker, interested in hypertext relationships both inside and outside of the digital world.

LATEST WORK

Quick Response :
This digital montage work investigates environmental and political pressures applied by real and fabricated forces …
after we are forced to decode the message.
Use the free QR Reader App for the most complex codes.   Otherwise, any QR code reader will do.
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about

We met binx newton over four years ago, while wandering around a local festival, and he became our friend.  We learned that he was educated at Auburn and Cornell in architecture, but he had broader interests.  We realized that he is in reality that rare creature -- a real artist -- with something to say.
We were drawn to him through his work that was highly educated, yet funny and witty, easily accessible but serious in intent.  Although his work had many architectonic aspects, at first look it almost seemed painterly.  He manipulated images, situated the images securely in “place,” and did so in a way that his work referenced the entire world on plain surfaces, not sophisticated design materials.
binx says that from architectural practice he pulled out the “social construction of reality”, often faking images to imply a world of calm, safety, and predictability, and played with it. Now his digital manipulations illuminate his view of our environmental instability and unpredictability and he fixes them in alternate realities.
His first showings in Space One Eleven’s installation windows firmly established his work, not as architecture, but as representations of its concepts.  A recent exhibit at SOE entitled "palimpsestuous" underscored this and further emphasized his interest in recreating multiple realities.
James R. Nelson Art Critic of The Birmingham News wrote:
“Palimpsestuous” refers to the palimpsest, the medieval practice of recycling parchment by scraping the surface of a piece of sheepskin and reusing it to produce new work. After several such efforts, ghostly and fragmentary images and texts survive, giving the final work a quality of depth and mystery.
newton's titles emphasize a dark cynicism about the superficiality of commercialism. Corpotainment made up of the words “corporation” and “entertainment,” alludes to the intensely familiar and the utterly unpredictable.  Over-ripe and under-nourished at the same time is an indictment of corporate cynicism. In Where regurgitation is the new creativity, we become subjected to what is old, with new meanings. These 14 digital montages serve as indictments of the contemporary world, to be viewed and understood with freshly-noted agony and anger.
By recycling bar codes over various, and often fragmentary, images, he creates the effect of belaboring what today is part of a mainstream system that identifies objects and prices of the multitudinous items that are part of our everyday lives. He treats the bar codes as a variety of graffiti signs. They can serve as a row of crosses painted on a prison wall, as a stage curtain partially pulled back, or as a fence or a number of other things, in ways that condemn or criticize the commercialization of contemporary society.”
The artist himself has an interesting view of this type of commercialization in his description of the piece that inspired the show. “…when backed into a conceptual corner and forced to fight your way out of a genre, sometimes the familiarity of something as basic as the difference between the two delivery systems of peas can give us some insight into how we might understand the difference between fresh and canned terrorism,” writes newton.
newton continues the idea of scraping to reveal new images - temporary, constructed, destructed - in his new work entitled Urban Microexcavations.  It builds on many of the thoughts offered in “palimpsestuous” as he once more returns to a familiar architectural site and dances with the meanings of grafitti.
This talented Birmingham based artist is fiercely committed to this place as home, but perhaps because of a peripatetic past, he is also at ease introducing the personal and local to the larger world environment.  This is as it should be because, as his work gets broader recognition, his skill and thoughtfulness will be a gift to wider audiences.
We’ve learned his work is not sculpture, not painting, not photography, not architecture, but a representation of all their concepts.  It is a recreation of multiple realities. 
We’ve also learned that his work while always accessible, often witty and not overly serious … is never to be taken lightly.

Anne Arrasmith   and   Peter Prinz
Space One Eleven
March 24, 2010
Collections
  1. Continuity
    Continuity
  2. Palimpsestuous
    Palimpsestuous
  3. outside
    outside
  4. urban micro-excavations
    urban micro-excavations
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continuity

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Palimpsestuous

We are the palimpsestuous.
We leave recognizable traces when we erase or conceal, allowing intentions and the spectacle to slip through.
We overwrite the overwritten, undermine our best interests, efface every symbol, and negotiate with the spectacle, but to no avail.
“The consumer is actually trapped between freedom and immobility, because although we are given the privilege of movement, freedom of movement is a fiction; we move according to the logic of consumer society, and through our movement we are transformed into an object of the gaze, subtly woven into the capitalist system.”1
Our freedom has become our boredom and it becomes filled with fetishism, fanaticism, fear, etc.
“Commodity has completed its colonization of social life – commodities are now all there is to see.” 2
“Shopping is arguably the last remaining form of public activity. Through a battery of increasingly predatory forms, shopping has infiltrated, colonized, and even replaced, almost every aspect of urban life.” 3
We resist, but our supports from above are severed and our foundations below are extracted. We are left suspended, and asphyxiated by, the residuum that coagulates within the transparent bounds of our consumer incarceration - tethered to the spectacle by codification. The Universal Product Code “is the mechanism by which the virtual establishes its logic in the real.” 4
So, the “Century of the Self” has exceeded the expectations of its designers “for the present age, which prefers the sign to thing signified, the copy to the original, representation to reality, the appearance to the essence ... the illusion only is sacred, truth profane.” 5
The topos persists and we are overwritten while we overwrite.
 
1. Walking into and out of the spectacle: China's earliest film scene. -- Laikwan Pang
2. The society of the Spectacle – Guy Debord
3. Harvard Design School Guide to Shopping – Rem Koolhaas, et al.
4. Telecommunications and the City: Electronic Spaces, Urban Places
5. Preface to the second edition of the Essence of Christianity – Feuerbach

  1. a dispassionate glare
    a dispassionate glare
  2. reduced earnestness
    reduced earnestness
  3. lawns cover human manipulations like thick pelts or even toupees
    lawns cover human manipulations like thick pelts or even toupees
  4. delirium for the masses
    delirium for the masses
  5. over-ripe and under-nourishing at the same time
    over-ripe and under-nourishing at the same time
  6. where regurgitation is the new creativity – distinctions are cancelled
    where regurgitation is the new creativity – distinctions are cancelled
  7. replacing hierarchy with accumulation with access to a credit nirvana
    replacing hierarchy with accumulation with access to a credit nirvana
  8. between the scraped and the scaped
    between the scraped and the scaped

urban micro-excavations

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outside

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I want to hear from you
  1. Phone
    205.276.0183
  2. Email
    binxnewton@gmail.com
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