Image credit: Film Still courtesy of the artist
Awakening Ceremony (2021)
Awakening Ceremony is from a body of work looking into extreme factions of the Transhumanist movement in Silicon Valley; those who believe that humans will one day be able to - and should - merge with technology in order to live forever. The animation takes place in the distant future within a fictitious Cryogenic facility, where Transhumanist bodies are frozen in limbo until the technology to revive them is invented.The animation imagines a group of domestic cleaning robots left to run amok in the long abandoned and deserted facility. The robots have gradually developed their own belief systems based on the information left to them, comically mistaking the conference coffee urn as an object of worship - the elixir of life. The animation shows the robots performing a ritual in which they make a bullet-proof coffee, as an attempt to revive the frozen transhumanists. It is intended as a playful questioning of the utopian potential of artificial intelligence and biohacking technologies, and linking contemporary wellness and lifestyle culture to the pervasive, and fundamentally human, fear of death.
Image credit: Film Still courtesy of the artist
Inaugurare(2023)
Inaugurare is part of a body of work examining the mythologies proliferated by cinema, which bypass conscious thought and provide a subliminal framework of how to act. The animation deploys the aesthetics of apocalyptic and disaster movies to create a suspended sense of dread - concerned dogs, birds flying away, trembling food items, and wide eyes in rear view mirrors, are all motifs that foreshadow calamity in cinema. The animation depicts a badly rendered figure of Tom Cruise fleeing these movie tropes. Animated by a downloaded ‘disaster movie’ pack, he acts out a loop of chaotic actions whilst holding a lituus; an ancient Roman wand used by augurs who foretold the future from the behaviour of birds.
Fitbit Worship (2020)
Fitbit Worship is from an online exhibition, [Blue Screen of Death, Offsiteproject.org, 2020] which explored how people interact with their everyday devices. It compared cyberspace to the spiritual realm - an abstract world outside of physical reality that remains incomprehensible to the majority of users. To connect with cyberspace, we rely on our digital devices to serve as mediums; vast amounts of abstract information must be condensed into simple digital interfaces for users to understand. Like an evil spirit piggybacking into a host through a seance, we are often blissfully unaware of various privacy breaches, background conversations of connected devices, or the sharing of our data between third-party companies or other nefarious actors. Fitbit Worship is a short animations that pokes fun at how we often ritualize and misinterpret everyday technologies, and the superstitions we sometimes attach to them. In Fitbit Worship, jade figurines are depicted performing youtube yoga, like an act of worship to the screen, while the laptop ominously spins and flashes up articles about health tracking apps.