'Between Pleasure and Paranoia'

New Work Scotland Programme, Collective Gallery, Edinburgh, 2006

Exhibition catalogue essay by Rosie Lesso

Will Duke’s animation Virtual Velocity (2005) documents a train journey through an unknown time and place, a stark but compelling world of artificial lights, washed out colours and hollow chemical winds. Where are the passengers, or the traces of humanity? And why are there no signals towards any sense of place? For those who have endured long hours in generic offices, transport zones or modern accommodation, Duke’s haunting short films will hit a raw nerve. His animations point towards a mechanised, apocalyptic future universe like those envisioned by sci-fi writers Russell Hoban or Philip K Dick, designed for passing through but not staying.

Synthetic and austere spaces are becoming more and more common in daily western life, highlighting the temporary and industrial nature many lives have taken. The omni-present electric hum of modern life may be easy for some to ignore, but its ringing grates quietly and continuously under our teeth. Duke hammers home this fact; by juxtaposing images of radio-telescopes and super-computers with train interiors, generic housing blocks and fuse boxes his animations peel back the veneer to remind us that everyday life is intrinsically linked with the forefront of industrial advances.

At the core of his animations is a juxtaposition between the pleasure and paranoia of scientific and technological discovery. There is a sexy side to technology, its glossy, slick exterior so full of promise and freedom, the feel of smooth cool metal under the skin, winking and glinting in the sunlight. Duke has clearly felt the power of its allure; Batty’s enigmatic quote from Ridley Scott’s Bladerunner (1982), ‘I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe’ is borrowed to title a hauntingly beautiful film documenting the Institut de Radio Astronomie Millimétrique, or IRAM, a 30 metre radio telescope in Granada used by astronomers to study the undiscovered stretches of the universe. This piece also points to a desire for the unknown; who could hear Batty’s words and not be left longing, aching to see what he had seen way out there in the far off galaxies?

The lack of human presence in Duke’s work points towards the possibility of a disembodied future universe. While are bodies are far from obsolete many of us do not use them to their full capacity because advances have made so many easier options – cars, phones and especially computers; whether we choose to be aware of it or not we are, at the least, low tech cyborgs. When we surf the net and email we can abandon physical constraints and reinvent ourselves at every turn. There is a flush of excitement in the notion of transcending the body’s restrictions, projecting our disembodied consciousness into the matrix, like Case in William Gibson’s novel Neuromancer (1984), who loses himself in the computer’s dangerous but highly desirable internal logic.

There are also many dark sides to scientific progress, not least the CCTV revolution which has left many of us with a deep down nagging sensation that we are constantly being watched, even if there are no cameras around. Places like Duke’s Babel (2005), tracing the interior of a housing block in Glasgow are never-endingly repetitive and suffused with paranoia. Is this a real place, or a simulated reality? And once paranoia sets in, everything becomes questionable; everyone is a potential enemy. We could lose sight of what’s real and what’s a simulacrum, who is real and who is not. If we allowed the grip of reality to slip away the human mind could fall into an in-between place, leading to identity crises’ and hysteria. Nick Bostrom, a post doctoral fellow at Oxford University suggests in The Simulation Argument (2003), that we may already be living in a simulated universe controlled by some higher intelligence force. Is our day to day living in fact part of a controlled scheme, like Vicenzo Natalie’s film Cypher (2002), in which the main character is constantly being observed and controlled by global computer corporations, where his world is constructed by complex, onion like layers he must struggle to peel back to reveal the truth?

Because of its possible implications and already devastating effects, it is key for artists, filmmakers and writers to communicate the role technology does and will play. As the painter Jonathan Lasker wrote,

‘An art piece can address the conflict between … technology and nature, which can help find the way to structuring a reasoning that can effectively deal with these crises’ as they arise.’

Jonathan Lasker, in CRONE, Rainer, Jonathan Lasker: telling the tales of painting: About abstraction at the end of the millennium, Edition Cantz (New York, 1992), p. 25

Perhaps today’s films will help us predict and deal with tomorrow’s crises’. Having said this, it is also important to be aware how much Duke’s work relies on the power of suggestion, implication and evocation. We are reminded that many of the writers and filmmakers who have explored these themes are often victims of their own powerful imaginations, and that predictions of the future have in many cases proven to be inaccurate. Perhaps we should pay some attention to the words of the great sci-fi writer Philip K Dick at science fiction convention in Vancouver, 1972 to stop us from falling into despair: -

‘… any theoretical, verbal, symbolic, (or) semantic … formulation that attempts to act as an all-encompassing, all-explaining hypothesis of what the universe is about – are the manifestations of paranoia. We should be content with the mysterious, the meaningless, the contradictory (and) the hostile…’

Philip, K, Dick Time Out of Joint, SF Masterworks, (London, 1959), see afterword by Lou Stathis, p. 220