The Network
2016
Mediating Environments – Exhibition Text
The world beyond the confines of our body is intimately connected to our actions – as much cultural artefact as something wild and other, ‘out there’ – nature and techne vitally expressed through our lives and creations. We continually feed into and are moulded by an interminable flux of co-creative relationships and cycles, reflexive actors who fall in and out of sync with innumerable collectives and circumstances. How we perceive these complex ecologies and the meanings we derive from what we do within them, frames our worldview, subtly affecting how we are subsumed by social fields and evolutionary flows. In this time of accelerating change and spiritual transformation can we come to terms with our uncertain predicament? How to navigate the indescribable, manifold environments in which we are embedded?
Matthew Bourree | Paula Deji | John Wild
Opens Thursday 3rd November 6-9pm with a live performance by John Wild at 7.30pm.
Exhibition continues until Wednesday 23 November
Catalyst Arts Gallery
5 College Court
Belfast BT1 6BS
The Network – Installation Text
‘Network: is a plurality of (organic and artificial) beings, of humans and machines who perform common actions thanks to procedures that make possible their interconnection and interoperation’? (Berardi, 2011)
The network has become central to our experience of the world, its tentacles reaching into every area of life. Linking together machine to machine, people to machines and people to people through giant invisible networks of information; a technical infrastructure of cables that feeds an invisible infrastructure of wireless signals.
As part of the mediating environments exhibition, John Wild will be transforming the gallery space into a dysfunctional network of devices, creating an invisible geography of wireless communications, as devices try and fail to establish contact, calling out to each other through unanswered electromagnetic signals.
This network of electromagnetic communications will be made knowable to visitors to the show through a handheld receiver that makes the invisible geography audible.
On the opening night, John Wild will carry out a live electromagnetic audio drift of the gallery. Making use of electromagnetic induction coils and a broad spectrum RF receiver he will allow himself to be guided by the intensities, textures, and ambiences of the site’s electromagnetic transmissions, materialising the invisible architecture of the ‘The Network’.