sound, image, attention

Working on The Formless Track, my collaboration with Zen Master Hyon Gak Sunim, has led me to reflect more deeply on my role as an artist.

Sunim is the teacher. The Zen teaching is his. My role is not to explain that teaching, but to help create a visual and musical frame through which it may be encountered afresh. In that sense, I sometimes think of the artist as being closer to an ancient monastic illuminator: not the author of the sacred text, but someone who brings image, sound, rhythm, silence and care to the space around it.

That same concern runs through my own visual practice. Whether working with sound, still images, digital tools or generative systems, I keep returning to the same question: how can art create the conditions for attention?

Generative image systems have made that question more urgent. They produce abundance: images, variations, possibilities, more than any one person can absorb. In that setting, the artist’s role is not simply to make more, but to recognise, refine, select, shape and place what has life.

This is the connection between The Formless Track and my personal artwork: both are concerned with attention. How do we hold something still long enough for meaning to emerge? How do sound, image, rhythm, silence and repetition help us stay with what might otherwise pass by?

These reflections led to the longer essay From Abundance to Attention: Generative Creativity as Cultivation, which looks more closely at artistic responsibility in the age of generative AI.

The tools will continue to change. The responsibility to look carefully, choose honestly and shape with restraint remains with the artist.