In 2008 I bought my first lap-top and as I was hanging out with musicians, I purchased an analogue to digital recording device. I love gadgets. In learning how to record I read about how digital technology represents analogue sound waves by binary code for each millisecond of sound. It got me thinking about how different for a  device to be programmed to replicate sound where as a person plays an instrument that resonates sound. It seemed like something very fundamental was happening if music, perhaps our oldest non verbal creativity, was being made this way and how would it change us?

2008 was also when the Apple 3 iPhone was released

I think we are living through the ending of the analogue person and the arrival of the first fragments of people that will use digital software as the center of tools in their lives and can be thought of as digital people. I think this is a remarkable moment to pass through. We have burnt carbon to power the tools of the analogue person, but now digital requires an electrical charge to drive the software and the energy to create that electricity will be the non burning of carbon.

I believe that software technology is causing a revolution of the individual. First in music and then language communication; now in the questioning of gender. The Western Individual is transforming and this transformation is shaking everything around us. 

Like all revolutions there is a very dark side that is coming out. Like all new  technological innovation, we humans to tend to be incredibly destructive with it. It is also revealing a brilliance within our inter-connected lives. It is so early in this transformation yet there is no going back now. 

I have always been fascinated with rock art as it was the first art I ever saw as a child of 4. And I always wanted to sort of do a tribute to that discovery and to honour the vitality of rock art. I always see European Rock Art more as a tradition of art. And that what was chosen to paint, the large animals of their age, was an act of reverence to these animals and the natural world.  We had yet to alter the landscape with our technology, we lived in it and it towered over us.

When I started this series I painted mythical animals whilst playing with making marks with my thumb. I realised that it didn't feel right to attempt to paint animals,mythical or real, as the natural world has been mostly conquered where humans live now unlike how it was 30 000yrs back.

But I did like the thumb marks I made. And so I started exploring with my left hand fingers and thumb. I came to realise that animals on walls is not the world of me today but the finger is universal. And that using pigment to make a mark is something we all have done when children. I liked that universality. Somehow I think that is important. 

If Western Cave Art of 30 000 years back could be thought of as a message to future generations that would be upended first by the agricultural revolution and then others that followed, what message should we send to the future digital person? If we are under going a revolution of the individual, and you are free to decide for yourself, then these paintings or any art that deals with this idea has to ask a question, a question in a way we have always asked ourselves. 

What is it to be Human? What is it to be Human, if machines are replicating so much of what it is to be Human?