Greetings from Heterotopia (If there's no Ground can there be a Horizon?)

Greetings from Heterotopia (If three's no ground can there be a horizon?) Rope Press, Birmingham. 2015. (UPCOMING: 3rd June - 3rd July 2015).

Scroll down for documentation and to download a new e-publication.

The internet-age has enabled and ushered in a full scale occupation of the digital. The digital is where we think, where we share and where we produce, however, as philosopher and media theorist Boris Groys has stated The future no longer seems to promise anything fundamentally new; instead, we imagine endless variations on what already exists and I believe because of this, new forms of digital production aren't universally recognised as such. This moment, where we are occupying the digital without fully understanding it, although not fundamentally new, will prove to be key to any form of future development. This is perhaps the only moment in our lifetimes in which we will be inside a heterotopia, in an other place, an unknown place where we can get lost and be misunderstood.

(An online only video work will be embedded here on the 3rd June).

The internet is just one of these spaces, there are others, computer games, satellite navigation, mobile telephone networks; these are all places we already inhabit. Our relationship to these places is not a touristic one, we do not visit, we are locals, we are of their community. We are living in what artist, Lance Wakeling described in the exhibition catalogue to Art-Post-Internet as The morning after the honeymoon of the marriage between the digital and the real.

Of cause distribution is possible throughout theses spaces and increasingly between them, this is where my thinking around the works in Greetings from Heterotopia (If there's no ground can there be a horizon?) emerges. If I exist in these spaces and take a photograph in one, what is that photograph elsewhere and else when? Through this show photographs taken in Grand Theft Auto become real world postcards, online walks in Google street view become animations which exist online and in the gallery, software is used to discover objects in three dimensions and tiny clusters of pixels become glossy, large, hi-res images.

(A link to download a new E-Publication will be embedded here on the 3rd June).

Distribution is nothing but an act of transformation. The digital has allowed this transformation to become more pluralistic, more organic and fluid and infinitely more difficult to track and manage. Content goes viral, things are ripped, burned, uploaded and downloaded and they would have done this without our intervention, it is the nature of the digital. Shipping containers have much in common with the digital. They are pluralistic, modular, networked, pixel-like, and are artefacts of distribution they are proto-external hard drives, you load in all of your content and take it with you.