#Stoney
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C.W.STONE: THE HUMAN BEHIND THE SIGNALS
C. W. Stone is the founder, owner and principal artist behind Burn-Ego, building an independent creative archive and transmission system operating across music, moving image, writing, experimental media and speculative practice.
C. W. Stone is also an adopted identity.
Stone was deliberately created as a boundary between the private individual and the public artist.
It is AN IDENTITY under which work can be made, published & discussed without the private life behind that work becoming part of the product.
There is no elaborate fictional biography behind Stone . He is not a character in the conventional sense, nor an attempt to become somebody else. He is an intentionally constructed public configuration of the person who created him.
The distinction is important.
Contemporary culture increasingly encourages artists to collapse the distance between creator and audience.
Biography becomes content.
Family becomes content.
Personality becomes content.
Eventually the individual becomes inseparable from the work they produce.
Stone represents an experiment in moving in the opposite direction.
The work is public.
The private individual remains private.
At the same time, the adoption of Stone has become an experiment in its own right. If identity influences behaviour, what happens when aspects of identity are constructed deliberately? Can a name, symbol, aesthetic, ritual and set of behavioural expectations become tools for changing how a person creates and operates?
This question forms one of the starting points for Stone's developing practices.
BURN-EGO
Burn-Ego emerged from C. W. Stone's increasing resistance to treating different forms of creative practice as separate activities.
Music had always been central to his work, but rarely remained only music. Songs suggested images. Images suggested characters. Characters accumulated histories. Philosophical ideas found their way into films, fictional worlds and visual experiments. Technologies intended for one purpose were routinely misused for another.
Eventually, maintaining clear boundaries between these activities became less useful than allowing them to contaminate one another.
THE PROCESS
Stone's approach is deliberately recombinant.
He is less interested in maintaining distinctions between traditional and technological practice than in discovering what happens when apparently incompatible methods are forced into conversation .
Musical instruments, cameras, editing software, obsolete hardware, generative systems, found material, writing, ritual, improvisation and chance can all become components of the same process.
THIS EXTENDS BEYOND TECHNOLOGY.
Stone's work draws freely from mythology, esoteric philosophy, underground culture, psychology, speculative fiction, humour and personal experience without attempting to resolve them into a single doctrine.
Contradiction is permitted .
Ambiguity is useful.
Failure is part of the method.
The objective is not to demonstrate mastery of a medium but to discover something through making that could not have been completely predicted beforehand.
BURN-EGO IS BUILT AROUND THE rather obvious IDEA THAT CREATIVity NEED NOT REMAIN CONFINED TO A SINGLE MEDIUM, IDENTITY OR COHERENT FICTIONAL REALITY.
IDEAS ARE ALLOWED TO MIGRATE.
A PIECE OF MUSIC MAY PRODUCE AN IMAGE.
AN IMAGE MAY PRODUCE A CHARACTER.
A CHARACTER MAY ACCUMULATE MYTHOLOGY .
A PHILOSOPHICAL QUESTION MAY BECOME A FILM, A RITUAL, A JOKE OR AN EXPERIMENTAL PIECE OF SOFTWARE.
The results enter the archive.
The tool is not the work.
Nor does Stone regard technology as inherently progressive.
A new machine is interesting only insofar as something interesting can be done with it.
Sometimes the most productive approach is to use a technology incorrectly, push it beyond its intended purpose, combine it with older methods or introduce enough human interference that its original function becomes almost irrelevant.
A STUDIO WITHOUT WALLS
Burn-Ego began as somewhere for Stone's own work to exist, but its longer-term purpose is broader.
Stone sees it increasingly as an independent creative studio, archive and experimental platform through which projects can be developed both individually and collaboratively.
The existing Signals represent only its first transmissions .
Future work may involve musicians, filmmakers, visual artists, writers, performers, technologists, researchers and other practitioners whose work can enter into productive collision with Stone's own. Some collaborations may exist within established Burn-Ego projects; others may generate entirely new Signals or forms that have yet to be named.
