Petra Szemán, David Blandy, Alternate Presence
23rd February – 1st April 2023
Seventeen Gallery
270-276 Kingsland Road
London E8 4DG
Still from Petra Szemán, Monomyth: gaiden / Master of two worlds, 2020
Single channel video with sound
Master of Two Worlds (2020) is the 4th and final installment of the Monomyth: gaiden tetralogy. Through an analysis of the position of the protagonist after having undertaken a grand journey through animated worlds, the video starts undoing the constraints of the narrative structure of the monomyth and calls for a lateral approach to storytelling. The Monomyth: gaiden project on the whole centers the space between the layers that make up our complex image-worlds, the holes in the digital landscape. By pushing these small gaps into focus, you can take up an ongoing ontological position, and rethink what constitutes a self or a mode of experience, Deborah Levitt puts it succinctly in her book The Animatic Apparatus: questioning ‘where images end and bodies begin, where truth or the real might reside, or on what side of this vestigial division between spectator and screen we find “life”.’
Still from David Blandy, Androids Dream, 2022
Single channel HD video with sound
In Androids Dream (2022), Blandy deconstructs the cyberpunk aesthetic first prototyped by Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984) and Scott’s Blade Runner (1982), and which has continued to be repeated and become ever more ossified. Formed of multiple simulacra, the work involves Unreal Engine assets, uses Kojima’s Snatcher - itself a replay of Blade Runner in videogame form - and even deploys an algorithmic mimesis of the artist's own voice. Breaking down the aesthetic form, the film in turn breaks down, repeats, refracts, and goes into reverse.
Commissioned by Petra Szemán for On Animatics for Saturday Morning Animation Club
LINK: Alternate Presence at Seventeen
LINK: Petra Széman
LINK: David Blandy
