In his new series Entangled: The Human Gaze in an Age of Quantum Entanglement, Terry Flaxton pays homage to the the Analogue, Digital and the forthcoming Quantum Eras. The new series consists of seven artworks and an eighth special edition artwork, each discrete and complete yet, as a whole, presenting a developing set of interconnected ideas concerning the rapidity of thinking, attention and cognition as human comprehension speeds up. The first part of the collection is made up of four works which represents a manifesto of the function of the human gaze during the end part of the analogue and the incremental move to the fully super-computed block-chain-mined digital.

Universal Triptych is inspired by St Augustine’s theory of knowledge: “The Passions of the Spirit, The Passions of the Mind, The Passions of the Flesh”. Though looking upward, Augustine knew that the body/mind duality is the root cause of the perennial human conundrum – we know that there is something else, however that which surrounds us, the air we breathe even, is the dominating factor in our reality, leaving us with little more than a sense of otherness, an instinct for the divine. So it was that medieval technicians created numerous ‘machines’ to make our presence in reality a little easier – ideas such as Archimedes Screw and the movements and machines it would power. The etymology of the age had at its base a machine - ‘a device’ a trick or an instrument – this also inferred a contrivance or cunning, “that which enables,” which sits closely with the Proto-Indo-European meaning of the root word 'magh', to be able, or to have power. Perhaps most tellingly, these words and meanings elide seamlessley with machine and mechanic, and perhaps above all else: mage; magi; and magic.