John Hill, Ant, video game, 2026
Art is not philosophy because of its stubborn attachment to stuff: to medium and materiality. Peter Osborne says contemporary art is post-conceptual art, meaning that art tried to get rid of its stuff in the 1960s and 1970s and failed. Without the medium, without something in between, concepts floated freely then floated away. Philosophy tends to anchor its concepts to tradition, one or many. Artists today are trained to be less respectful of tradition. They grab the ideas floating past, not caring where they came from, and hastily tie them to something heavier, a stone or a camera or an old TV. Conceptual art tried using language as its medium, but it quickly became obvious that this just turned language into material, made it heavy enough to hold the concepts in place.
If you look at the work of Zygmunt Rytka(ft), it would be easy to misrecognise it as conceptual. The images are black and white, the gestures are minimal. But this would be a misunderstanding of the process, of the order of events. Setting out from the house with a camera and a marker pen is a decision, but it is not an idea. To number a stone is an action, but it is not a statement. When you let ants run over your arms they look like letters, like musical notes. But the ants bite, because they are real. Through the medium of video they are flattened and desaturated. They become like language, floating free across the screen, and we try to catch them in ideas. Concepts come last, what something means is subordinate to what it is, what it does.
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Because of my training as an artist, I am interested is how the world gets turned into images. Drawing encodes the world in lines. In this work this image is encoded as a jpeg, first turned into a matrix of pixels, then into a collection of vectors. When decompress, vectors are rendered as perpendicular blocks of colour gradients, patchworked together in the hope they will fool the eye into seeing information that isn’t really there. The game asks us to work in order to find more information, our eating feeds the image in a progressive movement from abstraction to representation. I met the ant and the flowers during my time at Sokołowsko.
John Hill