#generatorprojects

Ruth & Alexander

I fear we live in endless round ups of culture, never creating or engaging a work as a piece of art or performance in it’s own right, but only through it’s ‘listability’. This is never more apparent than at the New Year. Every comment is reduced to a re-playable sound bite; a quote, with every iteration, unclothed further to it’s most titillating and scandalous stance. Every punchline - shaved and measured and shaved again for the optimal power : time ratio and studio laughter succinctness. They are repeated, as panel-show best of funny peoples’ funny moments, and further repeated still in syndication as the entire thing is boiled down to a soundtracked pan of glowing, sweating teeth. Broadcasters play clips out of context from other broadcasts and films that we haven’t watched and won’t bother now as we saw the clip, and another array of teeth will mouth lovingly about the performances in Vineable snips. 

Has this always been the case or was it exacerbated by the end of the century? The end of the millenium? One thousand years for us to round up, endlessly, counting down the best of beheadings, most memorable moments of treason and celebrity nip slips through the ages. Baudrillard warned us of this point, this Beyond of reality and history, when the things repeating become so far removed from themselves that we enter a hyperreality of contextless, detatched repetitions. He foresaw buzzfeed and universal understanding through the simulacra of hashtags and searchable 200 character metadescriptions of events. The top ten picks of the best of bits. 

Out of 2015, I watch grinning back at teeth sparkling in hard-cuts from news headlines to epic fails in 20seconds round up, and into 2016 I contemplate lists and make my own lists of what to watch and read and think about, to change about myself, to diet, and fantasise about, to go, to know. Every -ism under the world in ten snappy gifs featuring BoyBandnumber1 for 2016. If I don't get a chance to do any of it though, it will come around again, the Lunar New Year in February, and then more lists and round ups and restarts in the HAPPY NEW TAX Year. And what is a year, when we work all year round, and don't celebrate the seasons, or the gods and we don't sleep and shop all the time? We can round up each day, each hour each twitter, facebook and tag. We can list our favourite lists of yesterdays lists, the roundup of the roundup teeth clackering, tinny laughing funny people show. Happy 2016. A list for your 2016 before it get's superceded by a list for the new new 2016, by rounding up the lists of 2015:

Small gate infinite field at Generator Projects is Glasgow based artist Christopher MacInnes’ first solo exhibition. It consists of two computer-generated animations which incorporate sound and scripted text.

It is not always necessary to be familiar with the concepts of the artworks to appreciate an exhibition, but in this case it provides structure and adds value to the work.

The exhibition leaflet states: ‘The work was borne from a period of exploring the post-human nature of the internet: it’s a consideration of the environmental and human cost of our progress towards a cloud based world’

The first work is distinctly dystopian. A large projection follows a winding journey along an urban structure in a dark landscape. The scene draws you in and the changing perspectives evokes the sensation of a slowly moving roller coaster.

Booming industrial music adds to a feeling of threat, but it is mingled with fascination. The next piece is an animation of a serene, tropical forest, a stark contrasts to the dystopian urban landscape- a version of utopia, void of humans. Bright pink monitors, insect like at the first glance, are attached to the tree trunks. Now and then they turn. A calm, enticing female voiceover accompanies the dreamy soundtrack. The piece also includes a video-recorded projection of a tree on the ceiling, its leaves dropping and slowly floating towards the ground. Momentarily the act of looking up on the tree creates the illusion of it being real and present in the exhibition space. This brings to mind the different layers of reality that people can experience, through computers, TVs, and dreams.

Generator Projects are proud to present Small Gate, Infinite Field; a solo presentation of new work from emerging artist Christopher Macinnes. Small Gate, Infinite Field, a space of concealment and exposure, an immersive generated environment consisting of industrial substations meshed with the persistent growth of vital matter.A semi-allegorical body of work; an opening of satirical and ironic gestures, utopian and cynical in equal measure, Macinnes has created a multi-sensory installation for Generator Projects incorporating computer generated moving image, sound and script to create a paradoxical reflection on our collective consuming being.The work was borne from a period of exploring the post-human nature of the internet; it’s a consideration of the environmental and human cost of our progress towards a cloud based world.Christopher Macinnes is a Glasgow­ based artist working primarily with computer-generated animation and programming. MacInnes graduated from GSA’s Sculpture and Environmental Art programme in 2012. Recent shows include Boot Signal, Embassy Gallery and Simstim, Glasgow Open House Festival.

“The problem is that our own simulated reality might only be allowed to continue if it were either informative or entertaining enough to be worth the computing power” – Chronic City

Our networked, cloud-based cultures are a duality.

It has often been considered that the internet banished physicality and undermined a sense of self, and selfishness, as a contained body, that it allowed for creation of new communities, freedom of expression, sharing of knowledge. But nothing has really changed, there is still violence, injustice and gristle, physicality. In the end, the internet is not (currently) a brave new world, but simply a medium for the old to speak, assert and practice through.

The only difference is that it has become hyper: hyper-violence, hyper-bureaucracy, hyper-capitalism. Hyper, not meaning that it has become more, but that it is just more pervasive. Saturation to the point where a flattening effect is produced, there is no longer an image of injustice, just an indistinct fog.

Please sign in. Please sign in. Please sign in. Please sign in. Please sign in.

Beneath the gloss, new servers are plugged into old substations, generators grind in the dark, the cloying hum of transformers fills the air, in the gaps grease and thermal-paste oozes out. It is undeniably there, it feeds the hyper-texture that skins our displays.

But it is there and we are here: the amputation of context is also the annexing of our complicity.

Our world politics is still a politics of subjugater and subjugatee. On one earth the ground burns, littered with hollowed out Windows ’95 PCs and U2 t-shirts. On the other people shop for cat outfits on Amazon and post photos of the same breathtaking sunset on Instagram, never quite able to forget that the magnesium-rich tinge of the surface albedo emanates from a toxic waste facility somewhere in the opposite hemisphere.

What did we make that is really new and if we didn’t how do we go about it? How do you wriggle free from something that has grown into us, something mutually reliant, it feeds on our flesh.

Events

A series of documentaries selected by the artist Christopher Macinnes to be screened alongside the installation Small Gate, Infinite Field.Please join us Saturday afternoons at 16:00 to explore expanded themes from the work:Saturday Nov 21, ­ Into EternitySaturday Nov 28, We Live in Public + Artist in-conversation event with DCA curator Graham DomkeSaturday Dec 5, ­Manufactured LandscapesSaturday Dec 12, Google and the World Brain

The screenings will be held in Generator Projects’ newly developed Collective Space.

Contextual Material selected by the artist

‘Extinction as usual?': Geo-Social Futures and Left Optimism

– Rory Rowan

‘Rich User Experience, UX and Desktopization of War’

– Olia Lialina

‘Politics of Shine’

– Tom Holert, Julieta Aranda, Brian Kuan Wood, Anton Vidokle‘

Lovecraftian Cyborgs and the Alien Aesthetic: Part 1 – Cyborgs of the Abyss’

– Journal of a Cosmic Anthropologist‘

Less World to be Ourselves: A Note on Postapocalyptic Simplification’

– Ben Woodward‘

Dust and Exhaustion: The Labour of Media Materialism

Vibrating, pulsating and claustrophobic. Words that may come to mind if you so happened to find yourself stuck in a working database. If you would like to experience such a thing,

Small Gate, Infinite Field, an exhibition by Glasgow artist Christopher Macinnes, is the place for you. Ask anybody in Dundee- most already have and most will not be able to shut up about it.

The first room consists of one massive projection, sucking in all the light in the room and spitting it back out in such a choreographed manner it makes you swoon. It’s not clear where the film begins and ends- it’s persistent looping swings you along with it.

It invokes the same stages of motion sickness, panic and claustrophobia you might have experienced in a roller coaster simulator. The generated environment that the darkness holds you within acts as the heavy harness across your chest. Except it’s more than a simulation: panic is thrown at you in the inevitable question of, quite literally, the ‘bigger picture’. Floating through a dark repetitive, endless city stamped by the logo of one sole corporation, the simulator takes a vertical turn, like the climb before the drop of a ride, creeping up the metaphorical skyscraper of digital hierarchy, of which we will undoubtedly never reach the top.

An alarm sounds and an army of solar panels flashes on screen. Ironically, they can catch no sunlight- they’re in the midst of the perpetual electrical storm that cannot be harnessed.

The calm precedes the storm, and vice versa. The simulation symbolises the next big thing we are about to embark on that never amounts to anything, a concept reminiscent of the digital age where we are so overloaded with information and quick thrills that distinctions are swiftly leveled. This work proposes many questions to whether that leveling is purposeful- are we the hundreds of identical solar panels, waiting to be charged?

Escaping from the inky darkness, the next room is like a breath of fresh air. Two videos fill the room; one, a utopian jungle, projected on to a standing screen and one, a canopy of leaves and wires, suspended above our heads. Music reminiscent of a 2000s relaxation tape floats around the room.

“Welcome to our happy world. Welcome to the network...

... Do you feel refreshed? I feel refreshed.”

The languid voice is both tempting and relaxing, like a hypnotherapist, and also with the floating pink screens, is the only human element of the video. The screens nod and tilt their heads as if listening- another parody of a therapist, illustrating the reassuring falsity of the net.   

It wants you to give in to it’s lull, and with the convenient invitation of the bean bags, you almost do. Plonked down in front of one massive screen and relaxing underneath another at the same time, proposes the seductive (and comfortably addictive) nature of screens.

By deceptively displaying the supposed ‘inner workings’ of the digital utopia of the posthuman era, with the wires hanging from the canopy above our heads and the conversing screens, Macinnes has revealed a hypnotic lie in itself. Cyber blue sunlight streams through the generated paradisiacal palm tree jungle and blinds the viewer to an age old tradition of only ‘saying so’. The network can do everything for us, but only in visuals and words. It knows what we need but only because Google tells it so. Small Gate, Infinite Field may seem like it’s luring us further into digital reliance, but if we still hold our capabilities to read, you can see it’s ironically illustrating all the ways in which we’re fooled; life as a generated simulation.