GROUNDED Unearthed

GROUNDED, the recent exhibition at E:vent in Bethnal Green, which has in the past few months relocated from the basement of its converted warehouse, artist-community home into a lovely space on the main floor, had what was perhaps the shortest press release of all time:

The group exhibition GROUNDED brings together a diverse range of international artists. It aims to show work that deals with processes of modeling and simulation, activities that form the conceptual backbone of digital culture. However all of the artists involved are tackling this subject with an array of practices that are firmly rooted in physical environments, from architecture to installation thus addressing important elements of digital culture with essentially non-digital means.

Short but powerful, I think; quick and more or less to the point, and it certainly introduces many interesting questions. As the same press release, pinned to the door along with a checklist of works in the exhibition and a little map of the space, comprised the only contextual material to be found, it also provides an interesting lens through which to consider the work here, as one would have done in the exhibition itself.

GROUNDED was organised around this idea that modelling and simulation are central to, and indeed constitutive of, digital culture. This is an interesting claim and quite bold. I am initially inclined to take issue; however, I suppose when considered from a certain angle it’s true any digital thing, whether image, sound, environment, or interface, is really just a simulation, an avatar composed of zeros and ones. Appropriately then, I found the work that asserted and interrogated this notion the most interesting.

Boys in the Hood (2005), by Axel Stockburger, the Austrian artist and theorist who also curated the show, is a positively transfixing video portrait of several young men who narrate confessional-style what we come to understand as their experiences within video games. One talks about taking a girl out on a date who proceeds to jump out of the car and shoots up some bad-guys; another describes the atmosphere of the city he wanders through, mentioning the differences between it and Vice City, the setting for another Grand Theft Auto game this was my first clue to the fact that it was indeed a gaming experience being described and not a real one. The simulation is so complete that it often throws their identities into doubt; a fairly normal looking English guy talks with conviction about spraying bullets all over the place, and you begin to wonder whether it’s him or you that’s living in a slightly parallel universe.

Another highlight was Jonathan Quinn’s beautiful Chair and Weights (2006), a work so subtle that I walked into it (oops!). I was watching Josh Maller’s La Construction du Ciel (2005), a video of an airport covered in so much snow and fog that the airplanes are necessarily immobile, grounded; the empty, snowy landscape looked very much like that around the airport in Denver, my hometown in the States. Though the space was a bit too bright to see the image properly, I was intrigued, and even more so once the director told me it was a film of a model; this was one of those times when a bit of contextual information might add to the work, though perhaps it does detract a bit from the absorbing inscrutability of the image. Anyway, I saw something glimmering on the wall, and I was prevented from walking toward it by fishing wire blocking my path. I heard a little jingle from the weights suspended on more wire overhead, and followed it down to a dainty little chair traced in orange thread suspended between transparent filaments. I soon discovered that the whole work was a complex system of counter-balances, with strands supporting the chair stretching up the walls to ceiling and several metres to the corner, a strikingly simple low-fi metaphor for the complex of carefully woven data threads underlying every simulated digital image.

Nicolaus Gansterer’s Eden Experiment, No. 1, a mini terrarium blasting heavy metal music at some unsuspecting little plants, was slightly less convincing in the context of the show as a whole, though his surrounding pseudo-scientific drawings of ‘natural’ systems were fantastic. My personal favourite depicted memory and knowledge belonging to a genetic system of sorts where everything, even tiny falling people, is filtered into a historical root system, an expansive commentary on the production of historical knowledge that reaches well beyond its tiny scale. I was even less sure about the relevance of the final two works to the exhibition’s thesis: Douglas Fishbone’s Blue Lobster Beard of Bees L.A. Riots Sock-Rat-Tees (2006) a disparate collection of photographs of the things listed in the title (apparently a story-board for his performance at the opening, which I’m afraid I missed), while Nicolas Jasmin’s static-shot video (2006) depicts a food stand on wheels, silent at the side of a road that you can hear but not see, but with a sign shouting ‘The Winners’,? which is also the title of the work.

So does GROUNDED succeed in using “non-digital means” to make a case for the centrality of simulation and modelling in digital culture? I’m not so sure; I can admit to being a bit ambivalent about asking the question, as I can appreciate Stockburger’s evident effort to resist curatorial determinism in the minimal mediation. Nonetheless, he asserts quite a hefty thesis, and as I said at the outset, I found those works most intriguing which adhered closest it; the others deterred a bit from what is quite a fascinating and expansive point. I must also take issue with press release’s claim about the “diverse range of international artists”; five of six artists are Austrian and all are men. Surely there are women and non-Europeans who are similarly engaged with questions relating to the exhibition’s central question. This is important to note, because if the exhibition itself is a model of the community engaging with this issue, it appears quite a homogeneous one. So though I found the work uniformly quite good, I suppose, contrary to my usual opinion, I would have preferred for Stockburger to push the point about simulation a bit further. To do so would have allowed a more thorough interrogation of the virtuality of digital space, and of the simulated communities, social relations, and experiences created there.