Sophie Barr: Miasma
This video was shot under lockdown conditions from a house and garden in suburban Tottenham. It is eerily quiet, a strange vapour emanates from defunct TV relay transmitters and lampposts as night falls. Data travels through a tangle of cables into the ‘cloud’ whilst slime slips down screens and crystals are found in a primordial garden. A twenty-first century plague doctor dressed in Amazon-sourced PPE stuffs her mask with a nosegay of Hydroxychloroquine to ward against poisonous data clouds to a soundtrack of ASMR squelches, whispers and clicks.
This video assemblage suggests that miasma theory might be useful to help frame media more materially, bust cloud myths and connect trashy memes with mineral extraction and species extinction. It also implies that however advanced we think we might be, the ‘new magic’ of today’s tech means ‘we have never been modern’. |
Jackie Clark
Rob Lyon
‘FREERIDER (ARC OF A BLUE TIT PERCHED ON AN ALLIUM)‘, 25.5 x 30cm, oil painting on 1.25mm mount board.
‘FREERIDER (ARC OF A BLUE TIT PERCHED ON AN ALLIUM)‘, 25.5 x 30cm, oil painting on 1.25mm mount board.
With the South Downs identified as a possible site for ‘fracking’, the narrative of human exploitation continues – a society’s desire and moral limits are played out on, in and beneath this landscape. For Rob this underscores the enduring relevance of landscape painting.
Larry Green
Being absorbed: Emerging Photographic project