Production (smart phone assembly)
5ch video, 10ch sound, four tablets, television, computer-generated simulation
2019
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Production (smart phone assembly) is a 5-channel computer-generated simulation that unfolds across four tablets and a TV screen. The simulation depicts the process of smartphones being manufactured inside a virtual factory space. The work utilises 3D graphics to create a level of pseudo-photorealism that shows a number of human-like figures. These figures perform a series of different precise and time-consuming tasks towards the production of the devices that most citizens of developed countries use many times a day. The work loops seamlessly creating an endless duplication that is determined by automated logic.
Production engages with ideas of visibility and invisibility, asking questions of the sources and relations that produce electronic devices. The work asks viewers to consider how this particular process (smartphones being built and assembled) occurs without their knowledge or consideration; and to contemplate the relations between the space they are in, the virtual space of the work, and the spaces depicted by the simulation. It asks audiences to think about how digital systems and systems of production both illuminate and obscure: providing access to knowledge and amazing technological benefits, but also requiring that the system itself is abstracted and separated, hiding its inner workings. This work places this conflict into a multisensory aesthetic that seeks to interrogate these ideas through its affective relations.
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Commissioned by Lyon Foundation (acquisitive)
Exhibited at Enter, the inaugural show at Lyon Housemuseum Galleries, Kew, Melbourne, 15/03-11/08/2019
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