neonascent

Gateway - 2005

Mid-february 2005 I returned from a working trip to Holland, where I had been working on a 3-month IT contract. All this exercise of the left hemisphere, as well as the experience of being around nerds for months, had left me in an odd head-space that obliged me to make this art.

Gateway is a 50cm x 50cm fantasy landscape featuring Z-guage figures of people and cows. It can be reasonably described as a chintzy engagement with a metaphore for the internet / virtual reality; The tiny figures approach and stare in awe at a huge silver metalic, flashing, phalic tower which thrusts out of the earth - Go Go new technology!

Surveillance - 2005

Having gotten Gateway out of my system, I set about producing something a little more substantial and edifying. Surveillance was my first relatively mature video-piece, and uses captured and manipulated stills of Gateway. Surveillance is stylistically and thematically inspired by the admittedly quite clichéd Cyberpunk genre (images relating to neural-networks, etc), but also is the progeny of our contemporary “War-against-Terror” governement policies. There is a dab of humour in it too.

Those interested can view a reduced-quality version of the video (1.26mb).

I guess I should disclaim that neither of these artworks was really intended to further the Great Artistic Discourse, and were mainly giving me the opportunity to experiment with various media and themes. However, I think Surveillance managed to subvert the originally naive kitch of Gateway.

• Link to Gateway Flickr set
• Link to Surveillance video