Perhaps there is nothing that causes McLuhan’s words to ring true more than the four-decade-old writings of Manfred Clynes. If humankind’s existence as cyborgs was so clear to Clynes almost half a century ago… if Clynes vision is now, 42 years later, the "present" we see in the rearview mirror… then what is the unseen present… the unacknowledged present… the feared present… that lurks everywhere among us but is largely unacknowledged out of fear or ignorance? What is the unacknowledged present that will be tomorrow’s present… in the rearview mirror?

If today’s rearview present is that we have become cyborgs, then perhaps the future-now is the art of the cyborg. The art of the man-machine. Enter Scott Blake. Who better to make tomorrow’s art today than Blake, the self-described "seller of pixels."

Indeed, in keeping with his pixel-pushing digital persona, unlike the other 38 artists represented in this exhibition catalog, Blake did not walk into the Gatov Gallery in Long Beach, California and say, "here’s my art." Indeed Blake did not set foot in the state of California. Instead he digitally transmitted a hundred-megabyte file of his work from his Savannah home to our curatorial offices in Long Beach. In another rearview mirror moment, on receipt of the file the curators discussed with Blake the size of the artwork to hang in the gallery. How reminiscent this was of Marcel Joray’s 1965 writing on the work of Victor Vasarely, "The ‘originals,’ in fact, do not exist. These are prototypes, which he subsequently recreates, according to his mood or the occasion, in sizes that may be ten centimeters, or a meter, or ten meters."

Blake’s art of the cyborg then, knows no boundaries. He creates idea files that rely on the ubiquitous digital infrastructure for instantaneous-simultaneous transmission to all connected nodes on the planet.

Drawing on the work of Vasarely, Chuck Close, Leon Harmon, Arthur Mole, Rob Silvers and others, the content of Blake’s artwork is… the content of Blake’s artwork. In this, the age of simplicity & complexity – one wonders how long that’s been hanging in the rearview mirror – Blake employs a variety of fractal reductive techniques to render a portrait composed of some faux fractal element. This is to say, that from a distance the image appears photorealistic, but from close up, one discovers not the expected fractal elements, such as pores in the skin, but instead some sort of cybernetic architecture of Blake’s design. In works such as his award winning Bar Code Jesus, Blake has employed bar codes, that currency of the cyber world, as the fractal building block, as the "travertine" of his own mental "Getty Center," if you will.

In the case of Bar Code Jesus, Blake took the text of Revelation, converted the words to bar codes, and then engineered a portrait of Jesus out of the bar codes. In Ecstasy Self-portrait, Blake creates his own image from a density map of ecstasy pills as found, of course, on a site on the ubiquitous World Wide Web. In this instance the source is www.dancesafe.org, an organization that does drug testing. Dancesafe posts the results and a picture of the pill on their website. When viewing the detail image of Blake’s work, you may notice that some of the corporate logos that adorn the various Ecstasy pills in Blake’s self-portrait are sharper than others. This is because, partway through Blake’s work, Dancesafe got a newer, sharper digital camera. The artifacts of this artifact can be seen in the textural variations of the piece.

Even as so many of us are born, live out our lives and die, still debating whether painting is dead or not, Blake has moved not only past ground plants and minerals in oil and acrylic matrices, but indeed beyond even the notion of art as some physical object. For Blake, art is, what clearly it always was, an idea.