Editor’s Note: Lizzie Carey-Thomas is the new Head of Programmes at the Serpentine Galleries in London, and lead curator of the prestigious Turner Prize. All opinions expressed are her own.
For me, some of the most exciting and compelling work being made by young artists today reflects the myriad ways in which new technologies have impacted on our day to day existence, human relationships and connection to the physical world, bringing age-old art historical concerns into direct relationship with how we live our lives now.
Many of these artists operate between real and virtual dimensions in their explorations of the contemporary world, converting information from one state to another.
London-based artist Eloise Hawser (b.1985) is fascinated by technology, old and new, and our bodily relationship to it. In her two screen video Sample and Hold (2013-15) she put her father through the process of being 3-D scanned to create a forensically accurate but emotionally disconnected geographical map which she can endlessly animate, manipulate and reproduce. For her recent solo exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, “Lives on Wire 2015,” she repurposed the color changing mechanism from an old Wurlitzer cinema organ, a short lived but once popular accompaniment to silent movies in the UK, rigging it to the gallery lighting system to create a subtly shifting atmosphere.
Glasgow-based artist Charlotte Prodger (b.1974) seeks out moments of intimacy within the boundlessness of the internet, culling material from YouTube, internet forums and personal email conversations that describe interactions with objects at close proximity, exploring distance and desire. Her charged installations bring together sculpture, moving image and spoken word often presented on equipment, selected for its aesthetic appeal as much as its technological capabilities.
Young artists such as Yuri Pattison (b.1986) and Oliver Laric (b.1981) use the internet as their medium, with the online availability and distribution of the work taking priority over actual exhibitions or even authorship.
Pattison (who is completing a residency at Chisenhale Gallery in London) finds ways of exposing the invisible labor and physical structures behind this intangible, digital other-world, such as in his mesmeric video “co-location, time displacement,” filmed inside the subterranean, unpeopled interior of a former civil defense center in Stockholm now used to house a data center run an internet service provider.
(Video above: “co-location, time displacement” by Yuri Pattison)
Austrian-born, Berlin-based Laric explores how, in an age of digital reproduction, copies and remixes increasingly take priority over the original. From his influential series of video essays “Versions” (2009-12), to encouraging a collective reworking of a Mariah Carey music video in “Touch My Body – Green Screen Version” (2008) in which all visuals other than the singer were replaced by green screen so any background could be inserted. His recent ambitious project “Lincoln 3-D Scans” (2013) involved scanning and producing 3-D models of the entire collection of the Usher Gallery and the Collection in Lincoln to be used for free for any purpose.
New York-based artist Ian Cheng (b.1984) is similarly keen to relinquish control in digital works that use gaming technology and often exist as live simulations with unpredictable results. His new commission for the Serpentine Galleries launches in early 2016 in the form of a downloadable video game that users can manipulate.
New York-based artist Rachel Rose’s (b.1986) exquisitely edited video “Palisades in Palisades” (2014) moves rhythmically back and forth in space and time. Forensic closeup shots in which the camera seems to enter the very pores of the face or fibers of fabric contrast with locating scenes of the female figure in a wintry landscape – Palisades Interstate Park on the Hudson River. Close cropped images of Revolution-era paintings allude to the park’s history as the site of a battle during the American Revolutionary War, while the clever soundtrack gives bodily effect to the imagery – overall a meditation on mortality and the interconnectivity of events through time. Her first solo show in London opened at the Serpentine Sackler Gallery on Oct. 1, and she is the recipient of this year’s Frieze Artists Award.
Also New York-based, Trisha Baga’s (b.1985) immersive installations flooded with light and sound borrow much from the rhythms of online browsing in their composition suggesting shifting chains of associations in which the artist is the portal through which information flows. As such her installations often feature items from her studio, as if there is no separation between the context in which she makes her work - her everyday frame of reference – and the work itself.