Keith Tyson

Plug the Well (July / August 2003)

The work of Keith Tyson is concerned with an interest in generative systems, and embraces the complexity and interconnectedness of existence. Philosophical problems such as the nature of causality, the roles of probability and design in human experience, and the limits and possibilities of human knowledge, animate much of his work. Language as a coded system, as a representation medium, but also as something that generates a whole variety of realities also plays a central role. The heterotopias of the real and imagined, near and far, thinkable and inconceivable converge and find meaning. Using phrases, along with a list of them that could be continued ad infinitum, Keith Tyson creates images that cause the distant and the near, the fictitious and the real to operate from within a location. His media include painting, drawing and installation. His exhibits are hybrid forms, they are games, images, machines, mechanisms that offer places from which literature, inventories, phenomena spread out into spheres that are infinite in both space and time. In Tyson’s work the idea of dimensions play out in terms of prolongation of time and space, and the idea of breadth and compression. Tyson is not so much concerned with representation, rather he is interested in the subject of machines, mechanisms and engines that confront our models for handling reality and the re-evaluation of our subjective positions.