by Maja Markovic
Having spent the first five years of his life with an inability to fully articulate, artist Candas Sisman devised a language of sound effects in order to express his needs and desires to those around him. This instigated a process of speechless self-expression that has developed to ultimately become one of his life’s great preoccupations. The tools of expression have of course changed somewhat over the years. Knowing better than anyone the sensation of experiencing without the ability to put into words, he employs new and interactive technologies that attempt to connect and combine the human senses, from video to sound, performance, sculpture, installation, and even ‘static’ practices such as painting. Attempting to reach a common ground with wide audiences of diverse ages and social backgrounds, he refigures his personal experiences into a new world language: the digital, where “everyone’s spirit is based on feelings and experiences…dealing with the basic essences of human beings instead of accumulated knowledge.”
With rapid technological and scientific evolutions, new possibilities in the networks of nature, culture, and society create new conceptualizations of a reality that is in constant flux. ‘Living substances’ are undergoing drastic transformations, not in the least through what Robert Pepperell calls an ‘electrification of existence,’ but also in the ‘living’ component of substances. Electrifying existence connotes human desensitization to technology as a form of internal infiltration. Sisman’s works appear to not only attempt to resensitise the viewer to the affects of the digital but also hybridise the separation of sounds, voices, images and sensations in the human mind and body to in turn create hybrid experiences. From the work as a sound, image, and sensation, to its affects on the human consciousness once it’s been filtered through the mind organically, he attempts to create synaesthetic experiences through the artworks that, rather than static, are animated and full of life. The human consciousness further acts as a platform that is free from constructed virtual or perceived space and open to ‘new’ ideas beyond the senses, creating and created from an independent emotional and subjective experience, both for the viewer and the artist himself. In this sense, the experiences conjure up the concept of what I’d like to call technaesthesia: the ability to perceive and feel sensations via the digital as an organic ‘human platform’.
With a cerebral approach to his work, everything begins as conceptual and abstract. However, in choosing mediums Sisman states that he reacts from emotion through a process of ‘pruning’ and in the development creates a natural evolution of ideas – experience first and let the concept process itself organically…