TRYSTAN WILLIAMS | WEBSITE | INSTAGRAM | RETURN TO TIMES
“I am interested in the ways in which people communicate online, the freedom from collective judgement that psuedo or full anonymity can provide, and how it can allow for a fuller expression of what it is to be a human being at this particular time and in this particular culture.
The sorts of things people post online are often things they wouldn't express to their closest friend or therapist. They range from the deeply personal and tragic to hilarious absurdity and everything in-between.”
Trystan Williams is a London based artist, working with Laser engraved text/symbols on found objects.
His practice involves using snippets of conversation, excerpts from threads, isolated sentences and thoughts that people have posted online and laser engraving them onto pieces of found stone or ephemera. The text is generally taken from small online communities where posts either aren't archived or aren't viewable without registering to the site. This means the writing is in theory unsearchable and "lost" to all intents and purposes.
“The process of taking these often transitory and ephemeral expressions of human thought and emotion and turning them into relatively permanent physical objects is part of a wider investigation into online discourse that the artist is engaged in. A purposeful contrasting of the fast paced nature of the internet and it's never ending torrent of information with one of our oldest forms of recording, preserving and transmitting our culture and knowledge, the carving of word onto stone. The work is a deliberate creation of contemporary ostraca, or ‘artefacts of the now’.”