Iustitia ad Vitae Formae

Presenter Information

Jami Honey aka Le Creuset of Borg

Location

"Untitled (Aqtau)" (play)

Document Type

Poster

Start Date

23-8-2024 12:00 AM

End Date

31-12-2024 12:00 AM

Description

Jami Honey aka Le Creuset of Borg
Iustitia ad Vitae Formae, 2018 and 2024
Fandom: Star Trek
Digital Art
Variable Dimensions
Collection of the Artist

Rating: General Audiences
Tags: tng, data, geordi, the boy, friends of desoto, lifeforms, justice, knuck

Creator's Notes: A triptych devoted to Star Trek: The Next Generation. The center panel is a depiction of the events that took place on S1E8 - Justice, in which a boy is sentenced to death for stumbling into a flower bed while playing, sparking a diplomatic incident between a mysterious space god, a planet governed by that god's weird rules about plants, and the visiting starship Enterprise who brought the boy. The outer panels are devoted to Data and Geordi, who - of the Enterprise's bridge crew - are the subjects of perhaps the most thorough philosophical investigations of individual autonomy vs social construction presented to audiences through TNG's seven season run. As a collection, these depictions celebrate the deeply human ways in which the Star Trek franchise has boldly attempted to offer a more hopeful (and often playful) vision of the future than many science fiction universes have entertained.

Comments

Once upon a time in the twenty-teens, I found this amazing paper art diptych of Data and Geordi. I had been toodling around at my desk in my first proper graphic arts job - working as a production artist for a little local screen printer that could barely keep me busy with clients. So it was that I found myself at work listening to Greatest Gen--A Star Trek: The Next Generation rewatch podcast . Something they referenced in the podcast brought me to Twitter, and in the way of the internet, from there I stumbled upon an adorable paper diptych made by another fan of the podcast. I was working on getting better with the pen tool in Adobe Illustrator, and so I hand-built the diptych in vectors to brush up my skills/for fun. I liked how they came out enough that I probably would have chucked them in my portfolio at least, but I hadn’t gone into it for anything but a little drawing exercise and so I hadn’t bothered to keep track of where I’d found the art in the first place and couldn’t relocate it’s original source. It felt weird presenting it without the consent of the paper artist since it intentionally hewed as close as I could to a digital reconstruction of the original as I could manage, and so it ended up in the back corner of my graphics boneyard for years, until a dig through the scrap bin for a different project brought them back to mind. It was in the early days of the pandemic, and my dad and brother convinced me I would be an absolute fool if I didn’t start doing NFTs. I wanted something I didn’t really have any stakes in to do a test with, and I thought, “Perfect! Here’s this adorable little paired set of graphics - I’ll use them as a test for this little project and that way if by some wild twist of fate A) they sell and B) I ever do manage to come into contact with the paper artist, well then I’ll have something to repay them with in thanks for the enjoyment I’ve gotten out of them.” *Shockingly*, making them into NFTs did not bring them to the attention of anyone else on the planet, and so they migrated from my graphics boneyard to my coding boneyard. And that’s just as well because I think my comprehension of the ethics and utilities of NFTs remains shaky at best, even (perhaps moreso) on the other side of having made them. Even more time passed, and I was once again reminded of this little pair of portraits by a promotional message in the same podcast (having worked its way through TNG, DS9, and Voyager, and now focusing on Enterprise), looking for submissions to this very exhibition. I went through the project outline wondering if they might go on to have a third shot at being witnessed. I read the exhibition questions: “do they affirm the fan object as it is, or transform it into something new? Do fan creations uphold the canon of the original content, or do they take only what they need and leave the rest behind?” and thought, “Wow, that’s exactly what I’ve wrestled with in playing with this art, that’s a little spooky.” And then it got a little spookier! Play was the first of the inspirational Haggerty pieces I clicked on - it looked like it might lend itself well to giving the same pen-tool vector rebuild treatment as the diptych. As soon as I read the photo’s title, I thought of recomposing it as Wesley in the garden in the episode Justice of TNG. The questions, my process and motivations working with the paper art, the word “Play” with the balloons and the impenetrable fog immediately made me think of Wesley with the tossing ball, standing among that gathering throng of increasingly precarious community, new, old, strange, and familiar, all debating and negotiating with tense diplomatic restraint over his immediate, mandatory execution as he stupidly repeats, uncomprehendingly, “It’s alright, I’m not hurt, I’m okay.” I might be lost in the sauce and alone in the fog with my balloons at this point, but it only felt more conceptually appropriate the more of Play’s didactic I incorporated into my reading of the photo and my thought about using it as a platform to build my own little drama. Specifically, “the struggle between aspiration and structural lack, between new world desires and old-world infrastructure. [...] constructed identities and the play between public and private histories.” Fun little parallels between us two at completely opposite ends of the spectrum of stakes.