Edifice II is a 10 minute 12 second work that is situated in an art and animation practice that embraces 3D computer animation to explore themes and tensions around nature and culture, and conceptions of the utopian and the dystopian, through the rendering of often complex digital ecosystems. The term ‘edifice’ can refer a long-established complex system of beliefs, a complicated abstract structure that can be difficult to challenge or penetrate. In this work homogeneous human figures appear as often precariously placed performers, performing ritual-like scenarios, engaged in Sisyphean tasks, or unspecified debates or arguments. The individual is collapsed into multiple uncanny digital doppelgangers, placed in uncertain environments, simulating some kind of life, often without obvious purpose. Here the loop is embraced as a narrative strategy, a narrative where there is motion but not necessarily progression. The loop allows for the paradoxical expression of a sense of motion and activity which is also profoundly inert and arrested. The retrieval and mutable configuration and re-configuration of set-in-motion elements is compulsively busy, but is ultimately a closed system, subject to the repetition compulsion of the loop, always returning and repeating, unable to achieve resolution.

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Doepfer analog audio synthesizers, Jones Raster Scan (wobbulator), SC App/ReTrace, and digital editing.
Experimental Visual Music, fixed audiovisual improvisations.

A horse is running on the beach

Three real-time virtual environments. Each environment consists of a self-regulating cybernetic OSC system modulating audio, media object and virtual cinematography in tandem, activating both the space and the viewer's vantage point in relation to these digital assemblages.

These simulations may be presented as a single channel video work, or, ideally, as a real-time multichannel installation, with each channel offering a discrete vantage point into the evolving virtual space(s).

Tangible Data explores and infiltrates an online community that develops a “virtual” art market for a cryptocurrency-hungry public. A series of animated loops—created and monetized by the artist to suit the demands and consumption of this community—provide a basis for the larger project, which extends across several web platforms

In this new cryptoart market, everything seems poised for the virtual universe which paradoxically displays characteristics inherent to the material world. While the internet fosters accelerated sharing and open-access content, this community subject to blockchain technology rarefies the immaterial in order to allow collectors to claim rights over the artworks. This has the insidious effect of affirming the monetary value of intangible web-based artworks. And yet, this also makes way for an unprecedented transparency concerning transactions carried out in this market.

One of the components of Tangible Data involves unveiling the interactions between artists and collectors, documented through screenshots on online platforms like Twitter, Discord, and Reddit. These traces are integrated into the animations which display their exhibition context in spaces that bridge the real and virtual worlds. The animations are thus both artworks in and of themselves and models for real installations to come.

Ominous 35mm cinegrams of Albrecht Dürer’s 1514 Melencolia print are intercut, like cascading scythes, with saturated super-8 film of a woman in a fresh-cut farm field, evoking repetitions that exist in harvest rituals, as well as in gestures of madness. Specters of familial anxieties creep into this loose take on the myth of Poludnica (noonwraith or Lady Midday), a Slavic harvest spirit that could cause madness in those who wandered the fields alone. The starting point for this subtle portrayal of the familial effects of transgenerational trauma is Erwin Panofsky’s Life and Art of Albrecht Dürer (1955) in which he associates Dürer’s engravings with fear, withdrawal, depression and madness. In this pastoral horror, luscious landscape serves as the site of a woman’s idyllic childhood memories but ones that are disturbed by her ancestors’ experiences of wars and domestic violence. The interplay of the banal and the uncanny is highly suggestive as the film poses a question of whether the effects of trauma can reverberate down the generations through epigenetics?

‘Presence, memory and ancient folkloric sensibilities latent within the fabric of the landscape are evoked through gesture, ritual and physical interaction with the filmstrip.’
Lydia Beilby, Short Film Programmer, Edinburgh International Film Festival (2021)

THINGS TO THINK ABOUT WHILE STARING AT THE SUN is the result of sitting in a windowless studio for two rainy days having a conversation with the Sandin image processor while trying to remember what the sun looked like.