Face Blank

About

Mervyn Diese brings together a disparate group of Eastend artists examining their uneasy relationship with social media.

Facebook, an information blizzard leading to blankness of the mind, the digital mind-wipe, the notion of participation masking a negation of agency, gives way to Faceblank, a clean slate.

Comparison of the mind to a blank writing tablet occurs in Aristotle’s De anima, and the Stoics as well as the Peripatetics subsequently argued for an original state of mental blankness.

Both the Aristotelians and the Stoics, however, emphasized those faculties of the mind or soul that, having been only potential or inactive before receiving ideas from the senses, respond to the ideas by an intellectual process and convert them into knowledge. argued for the mind’s initial resemblance to “white paper, void of all character,” with “all the materials of reason and knowledge” derived from experience.

“[…]the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes “Awww!” ― Jack Kerouac, On the Road (1957)