FACTITIA is an installation by Mateo Santos Monje Shefford at the University of Greenwich's Stephen Lawrence Gallery. The project aims to investigate the identity of the factual and the fictitious, the relationship between both and our link with the supernatural. 

​

The subject of space has dominated the theologies throughout the history of man, provoking questions that have been left unresolved for much of it - leaving it up to gods, deities and religions to provide adequate response. As the boundaries of science have been extended, less of these answers come from theist sources. 

 

Now that we are in an age where commercial space travel is becoming more and more of a possibility, we have to look up at the cosmos and discover what it really means to be human, and what it means to still believe in the forces of the supernatural.

​

Having previously been drawn to this idea of the unnatural, the supernatural and the natural, I began to think about whether or not anything can really be artificial. Naturally, I found this to be really challenging. If the word 'artificial' refers to something made/created by humans and we assume that 'natural' is something which is not, then surely all of our thoughts are artificial and everything we can use to make something artificial from, is initially natural - unless, of course, the artificial is simultaneously natural. In a convoluted way, I am looking at the chicken and the egg - did we create gods or did gods create us?

​

I was reading through Donna Haraway's: A Cyborg Manifesto, where she was giving consideration to the social locations of a futuristic, hyper capitalist society. “Church: Electronic fundamentalist 'super-saver' preachers solemnizing the union of electronic capital and automated fetish gods; intensified importance of churches in resisting the militarized state; central struggle over women's meanings and authority in religion; continued relevance of spirituality, intertwined with sex and health, in political struggle.” It was ''automated fetish gods'' that initiated a link between the natural, the artificial, and the gods.

​

The first thing I think about when I think about gods and space is the Sun. It is one of the three immediately apparent influences of our solar system, which are constantly acting upon us. The other two being the Earth and our moon.

​

I subscribe to science and the facts that arise out of inquisition, investigation and subsequent discovery. Science is the study of the natural and as such it regards the supernatural as fictional - until enough adequate proof, subject to enough adequate investigation, deems it to be natural. The planets are no longer gods and demons, but real, physical objects that we can measure and predict. As science has proven the identity and physicality of astronomical objects, the planets are no longer part of the modern deities, they are instead confined to the archaisms of history. The planets and moons are real, factual objects that really exist in space. The gods that they were named after, have vanished under a blanket of adequate description, adequate explanation and undeniable proof - only their names represent the antiquated sentiments they once held, positioned - incorruptably - away from man.

​​​

The way I see it, it is the grandeur of nature that creates a god to man. The magnitude and complexity of everything around us that has forced us to create these supreme beings - in attempts to explain the physical awe of the universe. 

​

Gods explain what we don't know.

​

Science reveals the scale of what we don't know.

​

This project has seen a number of iterations over the course of it's development. When I initially wanted to create an album that was played as a game - something very interactive and hopefully immersive - I had no idea idea that it would end up as a series of static pieces that exist on walls and screens.This change came about from thinking about the necessity of the space that the work exists within and the people that come to experience the work. I also had no idea that it would encapsulate such a broad variety of my own personal opinions, let alone contentious ones that deal with extreme beginnings, endings and what the bit in the middle is all about.

​

Aesthetically, I love it. It's the first time that I have enjoyed my own work as a product,  alongside the development of the work in this way. Colourful chaos completely complicit with serene simplicity, heavily influenced by a range of artists that we covered throughout the MA. Some of which came from a rather passive observation of their work as opposed to a thorough examination. A notable mention is Peter Burr, whom we spoke to and whose work we covered in a previous module. His detailed, pixel-inspired work has had a profound impact on how some of my own images came to be. Most interestingly to me was how the extraction of information and stripping the image down to the bare minimum, lead to a vastly more interesting image.

​

Peter Bathurst's work, creating photoreal 3D, VR environments was another huge point of interest - even though it was, again, in a very passive or at least unassertive manner. It was by learning about how his visual work was made (in Unity, a game engine, and by applying a texture to a 3D model) that I began to experiment with different textures and shapes, leading me to some NASA resources. NASA often document, through photogrography, the different topographies of the planets and moons in our solar system - prompting me to experiment with different images of the Earth and the moon, and encouraging me to think about what our closest celestial spheres mean to us. From there, the subject turned towards philosophies, ideologies and other things that try to capture the meaning of the bit in the middle.

​

My first port of call was religion. It's the only thing that I could think of that promises a definite answer - albeit vague, contradictory and sometimes absurd. I started by looking at what makes a god.

​

For something or someone to be revered as a god, I feel as if it must harbour an aspect of sacrity. It must have some inherent value that is more than the material represented. This is not dissimilar to the synchresis described by Michel Chion - where film and audio, together, form something greater than the individual sum of their parts. If film was worth 1 point and audio was also worth 1 point - film audio would be worth 3 points. The psychological effect of the combination adding the extra point. The ideology alongside the action is worth more than just the ideology and the action alone. 

​

The sacred is created out of rarity - and what's rarer than something everlasting and infinitely powerful? This provides a possibility for why so many cultures chose to worship the sun, moon, and the stars in the sky. As science has progressed, we have understood that; while our Sun is one of the main reasons for life on Earth, it is no longer the most important thing in our cosmic neighborhood. As our knowledge has increased, so has our horizon. There are hundreds of billions of stars in our galaxy, contrasting the ubiquity of a sun, with the value it holds to us. 

​

This makes it extremely difficult to understand why something is sacred as it always boils down to individual perception. If you can convince enough people that something is worth something, it can become a sacred part of life. Water and oxygen need no argument. They are sacred by default. Without them humanity, and life on Earth, couldn't exist in the way that it does. It would not have developed in the way that it has, providing a richness that, as far as we can tell is absolutely unique. Reducing these necessities even more, leads us towards the molecules, elements and atoms - without which, no matter can exist in the way that we know it. The hierarchy of existence falls at the smallest hurdle.

​

What we have to keep in mind is that we don't live on the atomic scale. These infinitely small building blocks are things to be revered, created by a process we barely understand - but many of us live our lives unfazed by their existence. A similarity I came across with pixels on a screen. A pixel is representative of the smallest image that can be displayed, only when combined with other pixels in the correct order can information be transferred to the human dimension. The scalability allows us to bypass the ephemeral nature of life and look on to the undecided or indefinite future of the universe.

​

FACTITIA looks to present these ideas of origin, scalability and sacrity with imagery of the Earth in different states of existense. From the explosively fiery to the serene calmness, all the while battling a constant, visual and sonic cyber-bombardment that encapsulates the different sentiments of our digital progression, whilst silently debating the human relationship between evolution and creationism.