Two works by the famous artist and filmmaker Cécile B. Evans are going to be shown in the context of IAM exhibition research of the presence and importance of virtuality in today’s life and mind.
Hyperlinks or It Didn’t Happen, 2014
Single-channel video, 22’ 30”
Hyperlinks or It Didn’t Happen is narrated by the failed CGI rendering of a recently deceased actor, PHIL. In an intensification of so-called hyperlink cinema, the lives of a group of digital agents—render ghosts, spam bots, holograms—unfold across various settings, genres, and modes of representation. Multiple storylines build, converge, and collapse around overarching ideas of existence without anatomy: the ways in which we live and work within the machine. Throughout, questions are raised about what it means to be materially conscious today and the rights we have over the personal data we release.
How Happy a Thing Can Be, 2014
HD Video, 9’30’’
How Happy a Thing Can Be features three personal effects, mundane personal items—a comb, a screwdriver, and a pair of scissors—modes of technology with relative immunity to updates and upgrades. The handheld devices co-exist as 3D-printed plaster sculptures in a corresponding work, and here in the video work their digital forms perform a choreographed arch that implies they are being pushed to their limits. Inspired by tabloid breakdowns and mediatized disasters, the objects' paths explore the transient nature of spirit in both the human condition and our apparatuses, endowed through the increasingly overwhelming thrust for something more.
