Steven
Dickie
A
Hypertrophied Eye
NewBridge
Project Space
Saturday
14th
June – Saturday 26th
July 2014
Bristling
simultaneously with the promise and vague anxiety experienced at the
periphery of the human/machine frontier A Hypertrophied Eye
presents an immersive, vertiginous regression into inner space in
search of meaning, knowledge and an understanding of what it is to be
human in an increasingly augmented reality.
On
the street outside the NewBridge Project Space passers by (smart
phones in hand) stop to watch a video of an index finger performing
an endless series of 'screen drags'. Each subsequent screen contains
the word “MORE” in a variety of typefaces and colours,
epitomising the voracious human appetite for “MORE”; more
knowledge, more entertainment, more stuff, more of everything and
more of nothing. From the promise of unlimited knowledge we pursue
our technomystic guide beyond the mundane reality of the outside
world through membranes of red, green and blue transparencies - as
through entering the screen itself – into a disorientating virtual
reality of flickering focus, tendrils of wires, audio-visual
equipment, projections and sculptural objects.
The
first film projection follows our protagonist Dickie as he wanders
through a dreamlike, skyless landscape. There is a sense of
compulsion or intuited purpose to his journey as he carries with him
a gnarled wooden bow, painted in luminous green, magenta and yellow.
The B-movie quality of this mystical quest is heightened as Dickie
encounters, amidst the arid landscape, a Klein-blue, Computer
Generated, rhombic dodecahedron. Entering the illusory structure
Dickie finds himself in a temple to the moving image: a cinema
auditorium, empty but for one strange, shamanic character with huge
bulging eyes and a shining black gown of unravelled VHS tape. The
film suddenly begins
to fragment from it's narrative, accelerating into an insane,
hypnagogic sludge of imagery. “It's
intense.”
remarks a harrowed looking gallery assistant. I would respond but a
future shock induced paralysis has spread from my
visual cortex to my brain with
the relentless assault of strobing images; dayglo paint (or viscera)
dripping from an outstretched hand; digital clocks and interfaces
proclaiming “more”, “part two” and “end”; elliptical
telecommunications; glimpses of Dickie running through a wild meadow;
infinite miscellenea and so on, ad infinitum.
From
the outset Dickie plunges us into a digital hinterland, a
disorientating hyperspace so saturated with visual information that
it simultaneously excites and overwhelms. In this space even three
dimensional objects of the 'real' world become strangely volatilised
by the dominance of the screen:
a
sculpture of geometric forms condenses an impossible number of
dimensions into a single, observable object. Too peculiarly perfect
to be handmade the piece seems more like a virtual
object or computer graphic than any 'real world' entity which adheres
to the laws of perspective. The work poses an interesting
epistemological question; is “to see” necessarily the same as “to
know”?
Stretching
diagonally across the centre of the exhibition space, a shiny,
polychrome plinth (reminiscent of budget Sci Fi film sets) presents a
confusing assemblage of interconnected audio visual equipment. A
microphone inside a long glass tube records sounds both from the
exhibition space and from speakers placed at either end of the tube,
channelling these back out through a series of amps, thus creating an
infinite audio loop of input and output. This seemingly interactive
score of sounds resonates to the feedback loop of social media where
status updates, news feeds and notifications propagate the 'ambient
noise' of our own hypnotic narcissism.
Overlooking
everything and erratically roaming the space (perhaps tracking the
circuitous sounds) is the literal
Hypertrophied Eye of
the exhibition's title. Grown large as an adaptive response to the
proliferation
and intensity of visual stimuli, the projected CG eyeball is
overexposed
to the extent that it has become opalescent in hue. Walking in front
of the projector (and thus disturbing the stream of light) the
apparition is suddenly revealed in corporeal, life-like colours and
it
becomes apparent that this is actually a double
projection:
two images overlaid to cancel one another out. The sheer scale -
coupled with the unpredictable, seemingly conscious movements - of
the eyeball evokes an unsettling atmosphere of the uncanny. The
projection is interspersed with scenes of a man dressed in a
futuristic gurus cloak, surveying a barren lunar landscape. The man's
head has been completely supplanted by a giant eyeball as though
humanity's increasing epistemic reliance on sight – accelerated by
screen based technology - has forced a gross evolutionary mutation.
When
human faculties are augmented by computers (the universal machine,
theoretically capable of embodying all human knowledge) and extend in
time and space
through
a world wide web of interconnections and positions, what does this
mean for humanity?
By
presenting an immersive series of philosophical propositions A
Hypertrophied Eye
leads us to question our own positions within an informational
society and what
the increasing dominance of the visual – as the ipriori means of
accessing and understanding the world – might mean for our future
selves, for
other forms of knowledge and embodiment.
Iris
Aspinall Priest
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