Michael Staniak

In Natural Order, Michael Staniak hones in on technology’s ability to digest and decipher the vast quantities of data that can be found online. We have been thrown into a digital landscape without the cognitive tools to process this information; Staniak’s textured paintings reveal a tension between our analogue psyches and digital environments.

For millennia, new technology has been developed to navigate the unknown chaos of nature. Devices such as maps, charts, microscopes, night-vision and satellites, all aid us in traversing our physical environment. Even our brains are wired to make sense of random visual information through a process called Pareidolia, think of a time you have gazed at a cloud only to see an apparition of a face or figure. The human brain longs to decipher and ascribe meaning to cryptic, often meaningless, visual data – all with the purpose of taking the sting from our environment, affording ourselves the best chance of adaptation.

Algorithms and artificial intelligence predominantly dictate our online behaviour; they almost act as the virtual Pareidolian mind that sees patterns in online code. This can lead to physical world consequences: from simply taking a different car route based on an optimum estimation via an app, to the outcomes of political elections. Staniak’s new HDF paintings fuse elements of traditional and new technologies to reinterpret his textural information. His shapes and lines, formed using screen-based software and applied to the surfaces through UV flatbed printing, act like markers or borders amongst a seemingly random landscape. The results resemble a digitally mapped environment, one tamed by technological advancement.