Stephen Calhoun

Getting to Know

2025

This conceptual artwork about self-knowledge aims to instigate two results. The first result follows from a user completing a short personal survey. The survey makes demands on attention, consciousness, and creative mental functioning. This cognitive experience is the first result. The second result is to aggregate survey responses into a public archive. The archive makes possible an informal comparative ethnography of participants based in the alignment or differentiation of responses.

Additionally, respondents are asked to attach to their survey an instant snapshot or drawing. They may choose to add either type of mark to the survey while remaining anonymous, or not. This gesture hooks the results to a real embodied participant.

Artist Statement

This process-oriented experiment in self-knowledge and self-revelation is a change of pace for me after twelve years of concentrating on a variety of iterative visual art practices. The piece is an echo of the many years I spent designing experiential tools in the fields of management, adult, and public library, development. The core of the artwork are three surveys developed by modifying and adding to the Pivot and Proust surveys. A decidedly conceptual experiment in inquiry and self-awareness, my aim is to provide a surprising, stimulating, and personal challenge. Lastly, individual productions join a large and public-for-a-moment archive. The resulting collection comprises a first-person, voluntary, informal ethnographic archive.

This piece is dedicated to Abdullah Ibrahim, David and Alice Kolb, and Gregory Bateson.

Artist Bio

Stephen Calhoun, born 1954 in Cleveland, Ohio USA, is a self-taught artist working in a variety of modalities, most prominently photography, mixed process new media, digital cinema, generative art, stochastic art, and, sound design. His use of technology counts him exclusively as a digital artist since 2003. (Before then he was a hobbyist painter.) Starting as a self-taught graphic designer in 1985, he painted from 1993-2002. He took up procedural, generative digital art in 2003. In 2009, he took up digital photography, and soon began fusing photography with generative procedures.His experiments have focused on complexity, iteration, and symmetry since 2012. In 2022 he began to investigate how to incorporate prompt/diffusion technology into his iterative art practice. Partly a conceptual artist, Calhoun intends his art to experientially magnetize projection or contemplation or intuition. 2025 finds him designing participatory artworks that are far from the iterative art he is well known for yet at the same are centered by his decades-old research into experiential learning and, to borrow from John Dewey, 'art as experience.'