Social Experiment # 9

June 16 to July 2

In Social Exper­i­ment # 9, three emerg­ing Syd­ney artists inter­ro­gate the capac­ity of tech­nol­ogy to alter, or dis­tort social expe­ri­ence by deter­min­ing the rhythm of move­ment, the modes of per­cep­tion and inter­ac­tion, and the range of poten­tial out­comes avail­able to tech­no­log­i­cally medi­ated exis­tence.  This exam­i­na­tion is aimed not at the direct causal link between tech­nol­ogy and its imme­di­ate out­comes, but by look­ing at the con­tex­tual and envi­ron­men­tal impacts that assim­i­la­tion of  tech­nolo­gies has on how we expe­ri­ence the world around us.  The change is most often unin­ten­tional, sec­ondary and not imme­di­ately dis­cern­able, much in the same way that global warm­ing is pro­duced by the car­bon based tech­nolo­gies intended to improve and vouch­safe human life on earth.

Aesha Hen­der­son con­front us out of a day to day per­cep­tion dom­i­nated by vir­tu­al­iz­ing tech­nolo­gies through depict­ing in sim­ple mate­r­ial dio­rama, scenes of war, them­selves inte­grated into sys­tems that vir­tu­al­ize the enemy (and the con­flict) as a sur­ro­gate form of dehu­man­iza­tion.  Her dio­rama is con­structed with a mate­ri­al­ity that insists on itself, and insists upon the viewer’s active phys­i­cal par­tic­i­pa­tion, allow­ing none of the vir­tual dis­tances that we are used to insu­lat­ing our­selves with.

Tolmie MacRae uses mul­ti­me­dia to cre­ate spaces and expe­ri­ences that dis­ori­ent and refute our com­mon per­cep­tion of the rela­tion­ship between the phys­i­cal and the vir­tual, the rep­re­sen­ta­tional and the lit­eral space and sub­ject.  Using video mon­i­tors and move­ment sen­sors the artist cre­ates a blind in which the viewer is trapped in rela­tion to their own image – able to see them­selves under con­di­tions that are can­celled by the attempt to get ‘a bet­ter view’.

Kolet Hodg­son reminds us that tech­nol­ogy is not a new inven­tion by choos­ing as her medium one of the old­est tech­nolo­gies known to man: cloth­ing.  We are so long habit­u­ated to this tech­nol­ogy that it seam­lessly con­di­tions our being in the world, pro­tect­ing us against both the ele­ments of nature as well the social ele­ments of soci­ety.  Kolet’s work asks what demands and dis­tor­tions does con­tem­po­rary exis­tence place on this ancient tech­nol­ogy, and sug­gests poten­tials by which cloth­ing might respond to the ten­den­cies in com­mer­cial cul­ture to pro­duce homoge­nous, imper­sonal fash­ion objects that have no rela­tion to their owner other than as a kind of identity-cypher.