- Venue
- Cube Gallery, Phoenix, Leicester
- Location
- East Midlands
There is a scene in Steven Spielberg’s E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982), where, after the eponymous aliens’ discovery by the authorities, the protagonist Elliott’s house is hermetically sealed, covered in plastic and invaded by government agents in boiler suits, quaranting the inhabitants. A long collapsible tunnel, like a dog agility tunnel, forms the passage to the outside world and fascinated me as a child, in fact, was the best thing about the film to me, an irresistibly playful, sculptural proposition – a human-size dog tunnel. A similar tunnel forms the entrance to Dave Briggs and Jack Squires’ The Fading Afterglow of Creation, except this one is constructed out of timber and PVC sheeting, and spits out visitors in two directions into the gallery – which is darkened and lit only by red and green spotlights. Like the events played out in E.T, and much of Spielberg’s sci-fi and horror output, this exhibition deals with the notion of the domestic and suburban gone wrong, skewed, altered, made alien and uncanny, in this case by digital technology.
A sense of the alien is present in Jack Squires’ videos, (Cosmic Spheres 9,11 & 15, 2015) which greet you emerging from one end of the tunnel, with 3D rendered imagined artefacts, slowly and silently rotating against gradated backgrounds. They are slick, high definition and hyper-real: perhaps by a quirk of software, the rendered texture of these objects remains constant while the form shifts and rotates, giving them a living, rippling presence, as though they are in the process of forming themselves, remaining liquid within their cocoons. If this exhibition is a house, these objects are the ornaments on the mantelpiece: the forms are teapot-like, sprouting, antlered and metallic. Across the room is another teapot: this one belonging to a Teasmade that has given up the ghost and spilled its black, powdered guts onto the gallery floor, which in turn has been covered with green speckled foam and looks like chunky alien vomit.
Nearby, another robotic creature expectorates. This one is a household front door, free-standing and complete with a letterbox through which the contents of Dave Briggs’ junkmail folder is being undiscerningly printed in real time onto the doormat below (Junk Mailbox 1.0, 2015). Quite a large mound has already accrued by the first evening; scams, phishing, herbal aphrodisiacs, and some which have no discernible purpose – algorithimic haikus, the products of faceless robot-poets committed to paper here by a robot printer. Collected and catalogued this material would make a good document of humanity and technology in the year 2015, but is instead being automatically erased by email accounts enforcing an unflinching dialectic of spam/not spam.
The house that the door belongs to also has a window (I Need to e-Scape, 2015), a semi-transparent screen suspended from the ceiling shows a computer generated landscape; a hill, some trees and rocks, a sunset – it could be a relaxing desktop background, if not for the fact that the view is occasionally punctuated by a naked man with an axe. The projection is a live stream of the MMORPG Rust (Facepunch Studios 2013-) a game that sees players start out as identical, bald, naked men cast adrift in a post-apocalyptic wilderness, armed only with a rock. Through scavenging and crafting, players accrue increasingly complex technology, clothing and weaponry, with the ultimate aim of continued survival and dominance over their fellow man. The game has won a cult following by tapping into a contemporary desire to experience a return to nature, albeit through the mediated filter of digital technology.
If all this makes you feel reluctant to venture outside, conveniently a device has been installed which mitigates any need: two Glade Air Wicks™ have been hooked up to a battery powered fan and a modem-operated switch receiving weather information, dictating which smell is emitted depending on the weather forecast (Jupiter’s Helmet, 2015). This is a low-tech, DIY version of technology from our near future, the so-called ‘Internet of Things’; automated homes, smart fridges, communicating machine to machine to produce a seamless world of convenience, an undeniably ominous prospect and one which looks set to render the domestic alien and uncanny once more.
Exhibition Continues until 8th May
Documentation of the exhibition can be seen here:
http://www.phoenix.org.uk/event/the-fading-afterglow-of-creation/
