MATTI STURT-SCOBIE
Exhibition Texts
11/06/2022 - 03/09/2023
© “Great Adventure of Material World” by Lu Yang (2022)
Artists
Harriet Davey, Oseanworld, Julius Horsthuis, The Fabricant, Audrey Large, Jacolby Satterwhite, Lu Yang, Ksawery Kirklewski,
UFO - Unidentified Fluid Other cuts loose from physical life's gravity and explores who we are becoming in virtual worlds.
While artists detect the early tremors of our approaching digital existence, developers manoeuvre bricks in the blockchain to build metaverses. Public participants are gearing up to populate this next realm with post-human identities.
In a world seemingly free from fixed social constraints, with no binary labels - everyone is 'other' and who we evolve into is – as yet – unidentified and fluid.
Surrealism was born between World War I, an influenza pandemic that followed and World War II. It may have seemed like escapism or denial in a time of trauma, but what it revealed was the mind’s potential to explore the different worlds within the self. When surrealists painted their distorted figures in dreamlike landscapes, they did for their time what emerging technologies do for ours: transcend mortal bodies. 100 years later, fake news, conspiracy, war and pandemic are shaping our cultural consciousness. This loss of stability and trust in institutions has provoked a rise in social movements, causing today’s artists to revisit surrealist legacies. No longer limited to the canvas, they employ modern tools – capable of nearly infinite reach, iteration and reproduction – to shape fluid futures.
During the isolation of lockdown, artists engaged with virtual reality technology and CGI (software once privileged to Hollywood) to build and inhabit new worlds. As a result, new and uncanny realities were born - filled with seductive, strange (xenos) entities. Some float in limbo whilst others are traded as NFTs. When public space and social life were interrupted by Covid-19, a ritual of dancing and masking took place online in an attempt to reconnect. Face filters, digital masks and body tracking technology absorbed us into new virtual practices. With these came fresh opportunities and new dilemmas. As this digital noise of figurative and psychedelic art surrounds us, what does it say about humanity, our cultures and pursuit of knowledge?
Throughout history, humans have explored existential questions using myth. These myths are Hyperealities featuring supernatural beings - from Greek mythology's Narcissus to the ‘machine elves' many have encountered on their psychedelic journeys. While the questions remain the same, rather than gathering around the fire to tell our stories, narratives unfold on a screen’s glowing pixels. With them, we create new spaces and species to process fear and joy; to connect, heal and build community.
Are these digital creatures that you are about to encounter throughout UFO - Unidentified Fluid Other welcoming us, as gatekeepers of the Metaverse? Or are they sirens luring us in, concealing a darker truth?
(Matti Sturt-Scobie in collaboration with writer Julia-Beth Harris)
Viatrix’s Odyssey
Harriet DaveySound: Imogen Davey
Creative writing: Julia-Beth Harris
2022
Viatrix’s androgyny blurs all attempts at definition – primordial but pioneering, radiant but ravenous; with a touch that melts institutions and destroys archaic worlds.
Viatrix was nurtured into existence by Harriet Davey, as an ‘Unidentified Fluid Other’ to guide us. These in-game cutscenes mark our progress as Viatrix makes their way through a story parallel to our own. This is a moment to pause between levels, where writer Julia-Beth Harris (the mind behind the exhibition title) helps us to soak in our new knowledge in a chat room of glittering riddles and poetry. This knowledge is translated, transcribed and uploaded to your mind as the warmth in her sage voice percolates the skin. For the soundscape, Imogen Davey samples water drops and dial-up internet noise – at each new stage, her alien and yet familiar sounds return. Each encounter is slightly different from the last – like you, the soundtrack is evolving. This ambient collage of natural and synthetic noise tempts you ever further along the path.
Harriet Davey incubates avatars in such a way that their growth phase might never be contaminated by the binary of gender. Having self-taught many of their skills through free online resources, Davey assembles and warps digital ready-mades of human forms. This is a conscious reimagining of character creation and an exploration of the countless potentials of anatomy in virtual space. Harriet Davey probes the ugly and the beautiful – an undertaking that began at the character building stage of video games. Historically, game design has been infused with the male gaze – leading to caricaturish imagings of oversexualised or ‘ideal’ bodies. Viatrix’s existence is important: it shows what happens when the power to self-define is returned to video gamers and visitors of the metaverse. This in-game inclusivity stretches into the public domain – promoting inclusivity, diversity and representation. The hierarchy of designer/culture and player/individual that dictates final forms can dissolve. Having guided you through a wetland world shrouded in haze, Viatrix asks only that you remember this encounter as you re-enter the outside world.
ENTER
Ksawery Kirklewski2022
Every moment we use technology, or are even just nearby it – we participate in both conscious and passive uploading. As we face-unlock our phones or curate our mosaic of photographs we become streams of data. ‘ENTER’ is a keyboard command, an interface saying “forward”. Using extra-sensory tools like infrared, the work locks-on and calculates your dimensions. Here, we are seduced by the possibility of seeing ourselves on a blown up scale – on this webpage/billboard. The work presents a gamified vision of this process – of seduction and absorption: an invitation to play in these glowing waters. This could be our 15 minutes of fame – as the web shimmers with our abstracted image. Will we follow the Greek myth of Narcissus – fall in love with our reflection and drown in the lake?
Technology is becoming more invisible: screens and phones are thinner, telephone poles – now buried optical fibres. These snaking cables on the floor remind us of this hidden infrastructure – a mass of wires revealing its objecthood, before self-arranging into the flatness of a screen. The visuals speak to an older time, when lower resolutions meant digital images were stylised versions of reality, requiring imagination to complete. As you are converted into data your actions cause a cascade of feedback. Here, you are glitched by visuals from video games in the 80’s as your movements cause the audio to react to your presence. Arkadiusz Krupiński’s soundsystem responds like an instrument, each layer of sound interacting with you and one another. Your actions cause malfunctions and modulations in the composition. The soundscape is a plastic to mould, each interaction builds new sonic worlds to be discovered. As such, each new visit is but one of many possible configurations – at each new encounter, find a new self and foreign world within an infinite multiverse.
For a moment you feel seen, your existence is confirmed by industrial tones that swell and jitter. Data is drawn from your expanded digital essence – before the lights slither away to a place beyond view. By accepting the invitation to ‘ENTER’, you offer up your body to feed the cyber-organism. We become merged with the virtual, an object assimilated in wires. As individuals are packaged into information they become an extractable resource; a virtual doppelgänger to be traded by conglomerates. This paranormal ‘other’ is often referenced in fiction and myths: as a ghostly twin and a dark omen of things to come.
© Nxt Museum, Lu Yang, “Great Adventure of Material World (2020)
Photographer: Gert Jan van Rooij
Great Adventure of Material World
Lu Yang(2020)
“I don’t think the self exists. I think you have a superpower universe inside you and you can develop in that universe.” – Lu Yang
You have entered Lu Yang’s complex, philosophical world. In the first space, the film ‘Great Adventure of Material World’ transports you along an elaborate odyssey. This new mythology confronts long-standing, human questions: what constitutes “self” and “other”? Is there life beyond death? In each chapter, you explore a new afterlife until you finally reach the material world. Along your route, the avatars interrogate the nature of these realms: does your skeleton have a gender? What is shame without a point-of-reference? How can our spirit be tortured in hell without a body to sense the pain? Let us gather round these screens’ warm glow and witness the tale unfold.
In the second space you are invited to play a game – set in the same world as the film before it. Throughout the game androgynous avatars aid in your quest to unlock new wisdom and conquer fantastical enemies (many bearing Yang’s own face). His characters crossover, battle and collaborate across many of his artworks, musing on philosophies informed by Yang’s Buddhist upbringing. To Yang, the world around you is a matter of perspective “you can find 1000 universes in your home, or one in your skin”- our reality is not stable, but one of many to choose from.
In 2021 over a third of the world’s population played video games. This pastime (once niche) is now a mass cultural event. Like cinema in the 20th century and books before it – they absorb billions of people into alternate bodies, worlds and lives. Through cut scenes, time jumps and re-do’s video games destabilise our sense of time. Linear narrative ceases to matter. They are a realm of reincarnation, of trying different roads and tactics to overcome the odds. Are you yourself performing? Playing or being played? Whilst different characters vary in power, weakness and ability – we experience new ways of being, we perform with Yang. How might we inhabit new bodies in ‘real’ life?
Lurking in the air above is Yang’s monumental ‘Monster Head’ blow-up sculpture. This creature’s burning eyes watch as we investigate these questions of virtual versus physical reality. The Medusa-like entity first appeared in Yang’s childhood nightmares: afraid of the inky blackness of his apartment hallway at night, his mind encountered a vision of his own decapitated, floating head bursting forth from the darkness. Having escaped the dream-world, it haunts this hall.
Birds in Paradise
Jacolby Satterwhite(2019)
“With Green Screen I could explore the fifth dimension of what I couldn’t do when I was restrained to the canvas.” – Jacolby Satterwhite
We are greeted with a message written by Jacolby’s deceased mother, Patricia Satterwhite (who is herself an artist). This neon is a reproduction of her handwriting, the message “when we pass from this clay, we’ll still exist in spirit” glows with tenderness and optimism. Over the course of her life she created thousands of drawings – mostly diagrams of household machines and devices. As his mother’s schizophrenia progressed Jacolby noticed these drawings evolve from functional, realistic structures – to abstract, poetic gestures. This drove him to gather and transform her drawings into energetic worlds and scenes – soundtracked by music that samples her a cappella singing.
Two screens unfold – revealing an explosive world of CGI clubbers in mechanical landscapes. Jacolby approaches creating these worlds through the lens of Afro-Futurism (an effort to create science-fiction that incorporates African-American experiences, so that the black-diaspora might be reconnected with their ancestry). Ambiguity is important – is this heaven or the apocalypse? Within, we see Jacolby’s choreographed dances and performances of bondage-play. Jacolby uses these rituals of movement and sensation to process trauma and purify the body. Some take the form of performance artworks rooted in Nigerian myths of water spirits. Others, take shape in motion-captured voguing. Collectively, these rituals showcase an ongoing exercise in self-destruction, re-invention and rebirth.
To Jacolby, desire is “a rhizome of preceding experiences and information” and unapologetic sexuality is a way to free creativity from shame. Having self-taught music production techniques, Jacolby incorporates both the visual language and the sounds of club culture. In doing so, recreating the space of expressive freedom he found there. By sampling his mother’s music, it’s as if she becomes a collaborator. Even though hours of sitting down and rendering his animations left his spine damaged; this work was urgent and necessary for him. Through his art he found a powerful way to process difficult emotions – a way to relieve himself of grief. This work is a monument to a loved one, his mother living on through art and storytelling.
The Waters In Between
Audrey Large(2022)
“I am moved by the question of the surface and its potential to be a fictitious and ambiguous substance upon which reality as well as hyperreality can be located” – Audrey Large
Audrey Large’s ‘The Waters In Between’ towers over us, dripping warped elegance. It is all at once a baroque fountain, amorphous gel and 4D object afloat in 3D space. This impossible totem seems only half real. It’s as if one poorly timed breeze might send it hurtling back to its own world. It is made of vibrant matter, constructed using a CGI software usually reserved for character creation to build and distort structural modules. The resulting file: a translation of a translation, an export of a compression until it is made physical in a 3D print and its rendered modules are assembled.
The work is an artefact from a digital environment, it seems to be stuck between states. This digital form bleeds into our world as corn-based bioplastic and polymers that only solidify when exposed to light. The artist advocates for a new relationship to material, to disturb the way design dictates behaviour. She argues that an experience of an object depends on how it is encountered – each new encounter stacking itself on the last. As these encounters reshape it, she believes that “Instead of focusing on what’s real, what’s not, what’s the original, what’s the source? […] we should embrace the fact that matter, entities and identities are meant to travel”.
WHOLELAND
The Fabricant(2022)
“Who are you dressing for? Do you really feel fulfilled? Give yourself permission to follow your heart and go beyond what the physical world allows.” – The Fabricant
Circling the sanctum is a mysterious boutique and fitting room. As you browse the collection you might catch a glimpse of yourself in futuristic mirrors, but you’ve been adorned – so you pause and play. On this carpet, this catwalk – you’re the model. Your form is measured whilst ethereal fabric and alien weavings are fitted to you on the opposite side. Do you like what you see?
These are the garments, masks, face filters and headdresses of digital fashion house The Fabricant. Their aim is to stimulate a fashion renaiXance – a shift to democratised digital trends and new, decentralised economies that live on the blockchain. In their vision, artists from far corners of the world can collaborate in real time – making their own sales outside mainstream markets with online commissions, digital assets and NFT’s. In this way creatives can bypass the fashion establishment, whose power players implant collective insecurities for profit – selling us goods that will only go to waste next season. If you don’t like what you see, rather than send it to landfill just overwrite the file.
It’s a common ritual, to stare at yourself in the mirror and consider: today, how well am I signalling my values? Who do I want to be and where do I want to belong? Fashion is a tool. You might mask – freed by anonymity. Or, you might signal to your community – sending messages to those who understand them. The costume you decide could help you stand taller and dance harder. Facial filters and augmented realities allow us to alter ourselves without limit: we can beautify or become different species altogether. How does your body move beneath this virtual layer? Are you enticed by femininity, masculinity or androgyny in ways you didn’t expect? Here, discover new ways of expressing your truth – perhaps previously you never had the space to imagine…
Foreign Nature
Julius Horsthuis(2022)
“My kind of art can be compared with the art of the photographer or the cinematographer or the documentary maker, it is showing something that exists, like the fractal exists. I didn’t create it, I didn’t come up with it, I found it. And I’m trying to show that journey of discovery and that is where the creative part comes in.” – Julius Horsthuis
Human beings have often looked for divine significance in shapes and patterns – sacred geometry informing churches, pyramids and standing stones built to connect our world to higher powers. Guided by an invisible logic, crystals bloom; galaxies and black holes whirl into being. Are we witnessing the inner workings of the universe – matter arranging itself along omnipresent formulas?
In ‘Foreign Nature’, Julius Horsthuis employs computer generated fractals. Fractals are the result of various mathematical formulas. He visualises them using Mandelbulb3D – a software whose creator remains a mystery, codenamed “Jesse”. These shapes are natural objects – they are self-similar, meaning: whether zooming in or out, the code that defines them appears to recreate the whole. When micro mirrors macro (atom → cell → solar system) scale is impossible to discern. Horsthuis sees his practice less like that of a painter, architect or their digital equivalents – but more like a naturalist or documentary film-maker. The spaces we encounter are not created, but scouted for and captured. They are discovered by navigating these extraterrestrial landscapes and sci-fi cathedrals and composing a scene within them. The formulas themselves are not the creation of mathematicians, but their discovery. Like land or atomic elements they are often named after the person who finds them (as seen with the Sierpinski formula, the Koch Cube and Julia Space).
‘Foreign Nature’ envelops the whole body – a fully immersive experience behaving like a drug saturating the bloodstream – leading to all kinds of sensation. The visuals evoke those described by people who have experienced altered states of consciousness: psychonauts that use LSD or DMT to access higher planes of existence. Today, technology is the psychoactive – mathematical formulas can be used to envision this source code beyond the senses. To this end, the soundtrack itself was made specifically for the work by Ben Lukas Boysen.
Can we admire mutation and concede that a higher law exists? We may not know if our interstellar neighbours breathe our oxygen or the colour of their suns – but we know that if our physics extends to their planets: plants will grow and clouds will take shape under these same laws. In knowing this, these fractals become a glimpse of the universe many lightyears away.
“း Ⓝⓤ ⓡⓐⓓⓘⓞ ု 𝗪𝗢𝗥𝗟𝗗 𝗧𝗢𝗨𝗥 စ ထ” by Oseanworld at Nxt Museum (2022)
Photographer: Gert Jan van Rooij
း Ⓝⓤ ⓡⓐⓓⓘⓞ ု 𝗪𝗢𝗥𝗟𝗗 𝗧𝗢𝗨𝗥 စ ထ
Oseanworld(2022)
“Like a kid, you go in your backyard and you’re playing with sticks and pretend they’re swords. It’s one of those things where I wish adults can do that – and so I’ve been trying to conceptualise this way of giving somebody that same feeling.” – Oseanworld
Oseanworld spills forth from an ever-growing collection of the artist’s comics, visuals and characters. Two of these characters, Kami 227 and Kami 334, are here to guide us through Oseanworld’s kaleidoscopic ‘Nu Radio World Tour’. Each new chapter presents a new challenge. We will be called to act: to leap, dodge and explore; to complete challenges and compete with those around us. Listen up for your instructions, and good luck!
‘World 1’ is a place of energetic, vibrant landscapes and never-ending creation. Its colour saturation seems to compact the whole spectrum so that we see it with our own eyes. This is a purposeful attempt to reproduce the way species (such as the mantis shrimp) can see 6 times the colour of humans – so that we might experience this phenomena as euphoria within ourselves. However, in ‘World 2’, watch your step – this darkly psychedelic wilderness is treacherous and tricky. As we play, so do massive tech-giants. Osean’s sugar-rush aesthetic doesn’t forget this. We can have everything we want, when we want it. When we plug in, we open our minds to a flurry of commercials, pay-to-play schemes and limitless consumerism.
Osean (the artist from whom the world gets its name) found that as his work travelled from drawing on paper to 3D modelling, it began to sit more firmly in our reality. When Osean was a child, he saw Batman in his father’s sketchbook and for a moment assumed he had created him. He didn’t, but seeing the character exist both on paper and on television – he was moved by how it seemed to travel between analogue and digital mediums. Osean is a prime example of a creative who uses emerging technologies to broaden our sense of which mediums belong to ‘art’, as he builds worlds for his online community. Having grown up immersed in video games and social media – he measures distance in pixels rather than metres, having spent so much time in virtual reality.
In childhood, untouched by ideas of maturity and silliness – we are bolder. We play with stick swords and invent fantasy worlds. In these worlds we make friends and overcome challenges – building community in the process. Today, we can see this taking place on video-game message boards and (even more hybrid) augmented-reality games such as Pokémon GO – which pushed people to outdoor spaces, finding new companions along the way. ‘Nu Radio World Tour’ was commissioned to create this space of play – to discover what happens when characters, music, noise and colour arrive from the digital to the physical. Osean is a creative from outside art-world institutions, one that pumps-up our dopamine levels, builds community and brings joy.