Dermot Wilson
I think all of these pieces are about “romanticism lost”.
In my thinking about what pieces would work best for äutöshøw I started with my romantic notions of the automobile AND automata, i.e E.T.A. Hoffman’s machine dancers and toys, a place where technology meets organic life and nature. I also started to think about what my fellow artists were doing and what images they were coming up with. I started to see how we all were expressing different interests and contents AS WELL AS different styles. From these beginnings I realized that äutöshøw was not for me, about the automobile at all, but more about the loss of that romance that we used to attach to the car. Car culture is not what it used to be.
My nostalgic memories of drive-ins, hot cars, bike gangs, road trips, Friday nights cruising suburban streets, sex in cars, etc. seem now be a part of a lost world.
Those memories are altered and affected by our present culture, our present way of life. The romance with the car is as forgotten as the junked vehicles that we picture in the show. What does that mean? How does that loss of innocence fit into the worldview of such writers as Paul Virilio? Don’t we need romance and speed and consumer goods to experience our lives? Are we not so mediated and plugged into the “grid”, that escape is impossible?
I agree with Dave and Lori that there are stories of decadent capitalism and gender-based romanticism in this show. I hope that my works add an element of “connection” and even “participation” in the problem of the car. We must admit of our own complacency and that we have created these garbage heaps, these global desires.
Self-portrait in Traffic
For this work I recorded and assembled traffic-cam photographs from all over the world on one day, April 21, 2007. I ended up with about 900 images and printed them as “sticky notes”. I then used these images as “pixels” with which to build an image of my own face that stands about nine feet tall. The image is “swirling”, disjointed, and somehow frightening as the viewer moves in to view the traffic images and back to piece together the portrait. I was very interested in how this image spoke about the amount of surveillance that we are embedded in everywhere and every day. It shows the extent of our obsession with information and the absurdity of web communications.
Drive-in Movie Monster Maker
This third installation component in äutöshøw is the culmination of an idea I had about five years ago as I was working on a piece called ‘Lectric Chair, for a show in Saskatoon. Drive-in Movie Monster Maker is a chroma-key installation that includes: a specially constructed table and diorama, several painted panels, a surveillance camera, a video mixer with chroma-key capabilities and a dedicated video projection. I think this piece is important to the show because it attempts to bring back that lost romanticism by immersing the viewer in the drive-in experience. But it is a mediated experience, one that is inherently unsatisfactory for the viewer because for the whole time that they become a “monster” they are unable to view themselves playing within the image.
Morgo and the Ice Lake Windstorm Video
In this piece I combine a large-scale movie poster with a very small-scale drive-in movie screen. Inside the screen is my dream home. What could be better than a bedroom beneath a huge projection screen? All the people you meet are social watchers, all the food you eat is candy, and everyone is ready to travel to wonderful places. In the video two children are gazing out to a strange cityscape of dancing monsters, madly scattering crowds, and fedora-wearing American detectives taking rickshaw rides. As they watch, the air gradually fills with objects, weighty objects full of comic symbolism and pseudo-prophetic meaning.
Morgo is a peculiar monster. One of the few female Godzilla clones, Morgo (in the original movie it was Gorgo) is forced by the “scientists and the purveyors of spectacle” to save her offspring and destroy London in the process. Is there a possibility of a situationist reading of this particular monster? Anyway I liked the connections that Virilio maps out between our individual drive-in monster memories and our technologies for transport/speed/motion.
“The promises of monsters will be a mapping exercise and travelogue through mindscapes and landscapes of what may count as nature in certain local/global struggles. These contests are situated in a strange, allochronic time. A time of myself and my readers in the last decade of the second Christian millennium - and in a foreign allotopic place - the womb of a pregnant monster. The theory is meant to orient, to provide the roughest sketch for travel, by means of moving within and through a relentless artifactualism, which forbids any direct si(gh)tings of nature, to a science fictional, speculative factual, SF place called, simply, elsewhere.”
This is a quote from the writings of Paul Virilio that I discovered in a book called negative Horizon. I read this book in tandem with a story by William Gibson called the Gernsback Continuum and a popular history text called Men of Tomorrow: Geeks, Gangsters and the Birth of the Comic Book by Gerald Jones. It seems that from the romantic imagination of Gernsback there is a mystery and a motivation to look forward in time and to shape our own personal aesthetics through that examination of a fantastic future. From Virilio though we see how that imaginative fiction worldview is part of the situationist spectacle and is a psychological sedative for imaginative people. The pregnant monsters that dance inside our chaos, the metallic men that strut upon suspended chrome-alloy highways, the inflated ray-gun shaped vehicles that streak across starscapes are all replacements for the real future that awaits us. J.G. Ballard, also enamored of the world of automobiles if we consider his story The island, attempts to access our romantic imaginations by writing about the consequences of a mechanistic, isolating, “automatic” future and then proceeds to show us how that world will affect our psyches, how it will infect our thoughts.