Small Gate, Infinite Field

Oct 2

Generator Projects are proud to present Small Gate, Infinite Field; a solo presentation of new work from emerging artist Christopher Macinnes. Small Gate, Infinite Field, a space of concealment and exposure, an immersive generated environment consisting of industrial substations meshed with the persistent growth of vital matter.A semi-allegorical body of work; an opening of satirical and ironic gestures, utopian and cynical in equal measure, Macinnes has created a multi-sensory installation for Generator Projects incorporating computer generated moving image, sound and script to create a paradoxical reflection on our collective consuming being.The work was borne from a period of exploring the post-human nature of the internet; it’s a consideration of the environmental and human cost of our progress towards a cloud based world.Christopher Macinnes is a Glasgow based artist working primarily with computer-generated animation and programming. MacInnes graduated from GSA’s Sculpture and Environmental Art programme in 2012. Recent shows include Boot Signal, Embassy Gallery and Simstim, Glasgow Open House Festival.

“The problem is that our own simulated reality might only be allowed to continue if it were either informative or entertaining enough to be worth the computing power” – Chronic City

Our networked, cloud-based cultures are a duality.

It has often been considered that the internet banished physicality and undermined a sense of self, and selfishness, as a contained body, that it allowed for creation of new communities, freedom of expression, sharing of knowledge. But nothing has really changed, there is still violence, injustice and gristle, physicality. In the end, the internet is not (currently) a brave new world, but simply a medium for the old to speak, assert and practice through.

The only difference is that it has become hyper: hyper-violence, hyper-bureaucracy, hyper-capitalism. Hyper, not meaning that it has become more, but that it is just more pervasive. Saturation to the point where a flattening effect is produced, there is no longer an image of injustice, just an indistinct fog.

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Beneath the gloss, new servers are plugged into old substations, generators grind in the dark, the cloying hum of transformers fills the air, in the gaps grease and thermal-paste oozes out. It is undeniably there, it feeds the hyper-texture that skins our displays.

But it is there and we are here: the amputation of context is also the annexing of our complicity.

Our world politics is still a politics of subjugater and subjugatee. On one earth the ground burns, littered with hollowed out Windows ’95 PCs and U2 t-shirts. On the other people shop for cat outfits on Amazon and post photos of the same breathtaking sunset on Instagram, never quite able to forget that the magnesium-rich tinge of the surface albedo emanates from a toxic waste facility somewhere in the opposite hemisphere.

What did we make that is really new and if we didn’t how do we go about it? How do you wriggle free from something that has grown into us, something mutually reliant, it feeds on our flesh.

Events

A series of documentaries selected by the artist Christopher Macinnes to be screened alongside the installation Small Gate, Infinite Field.Please join us Saturday afternoons at 16:00 to explore expanded themes from the work:Saturday Nov 21, Into EternitySaturday Nov 28, We Live in Public + Artist in-conversation event with DCA curator Graham DomkeSaturday Dec 5, Manufactured LandscapesSaturday Dec 12, Google and the World Brain

The screenings will be held in Generator Projects’ newly developed Collective Space.