Invisible Materials  #1 (Air) 2022-

Air, moving air, transparent polythene tubes,

4 fans, cargo slings, teensy, software,

tone generator and elements of the existing room.

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Pic as installed @ Slade Degree Show, London

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‘Tubes’ harnesses the power of unseen digital superstructures - in other words a few lines of the ubiquitous computer code that has acquired the power to manage our lives. In this work the ‘invisible superstructure’ infiltrates our physical world by moving the air within the room - the same air that surrounds us and that we take into our bodies with every breath.

 

The air is blown into and sucked out of flexible transparent tubes, altering their configuration. They crackle as they move around and occupy this human space. Each of the fans that moves the air generated an accompanying acoustic tone to create an episodic, polyphonic soundtrack that ranges from energetic fanfares of sound and movement to periods of complete silence and stillness as everything ‘rests’. Sometimes the tubes fill in reaction to physical stimulus (to your proximity perhaps), sometimes they move introspectively, their routine self-determined in an infinite series of combinations - that we might find comforting to interpret humanistically as breathing and pausing.

 

 

** This work was previously shown at the Slade Degree Show 2023 in a Lecture Room. The room was deliberately untouched and left with all its fittings and furniture - the work providing an overlay to the already existing space and all its connotations.  As with many of my works, each installation is site specific and a remix of the ingredients that comprise the work. This allows the work to change and embrace all sorts of spaces and not just the classic ’white cube’ style gallery room.