Alex Davies
Alex Davies, Dislocation
For anyone interested in new media magic, but irritated by the gimmicks of the virtual reality labs, Alex Davies’ work is easy to like. The term ‘mixed reality’ will not suffice to describe it, implying as it does some integration of reality with its other, be that un-real, sur-real, hyper-real, whatever. What is at stake in Davies’ work is not an integration, but an invocation, a seduction – the opposite of simulation. It is not the real being seduced by some not-real, for the decisive exchange is precisely that seduction which puts every opposition between reality and its others in doubt and reveals them in their sheer reversibility.
On entering Davies’ Dislocation, you are drawn to one of four small peepholes, built into the wall of this otherwise featureless room. You peer into the peephole and see the room, and yourself from behind. Before long the false privacy of the voyeur is disrupted by ghostly visitors, who appear behind you. But, glancing over your shoulder, you find the space empty.
For work that would undermine the architecture of experience, the experience of architecture is an essential parameter. Yet for all its magic, Dislocation turns on neither illusion nor immersion, but on the moment of their undoing. (The alternative – to remain within the illusion indefinitely – is the unthinkable catastrophe that must be averted at all costs.)
The uncanniness of Davies’ installations resides in their uncertain, compound, parallel temporalities, on the accumulation and glimpses of pasts and, for all we know, futures. These are not the pasts or futures of the image, nor of the viewers. They belong to the space. A peculiar digital trespass: trapping and expropriating that which people call their own, but which is yet not theirs.
All this has nothing to do with ‘real-time’. It is another time, given as the incursion of another mood, as in déja vu – its truth is not known, but felt. “[A] moment that no longer belongs to time,” (1) in Derrida’s memorable phrase, interrupting the present, the coherence or cohesion of this moment which in any case rests not on the proven continuity of things, so much as on our aptitude for overlooking and ignoring them. And this other time is always populated. To spatialise memory is to socialise it.
The spectral logic of new media: to populate by reflection. Hence, the special relationship between the ghost and the copy. Having both an ethereality and a real, imaginary potency, ghosts can multiply, proliferate and infest with ease. It would not be doing the ghost justice to say that it can reproduce, nor that it is a reproduction. Rather, the ghost is reproducibility, it is itself the very danger of reproduction that cannot be reduced to, nor contained by, either the thing reproduced or the reproduction.
It is, paradoxically, by keeping things resolutely audio-visual that Davies precipitates a supernatural or ‘extra-sensory’ experience. Ghosts are all image, as it were; hence, their intimate partnership with media, especially photo-media. For the copy, too – the work of art in its mechanical reproducibility – treads this line between substantial and ethereal, all the more delicately in its digital reproducibility.
Simulation, as it moves toward saturation, flooding the senses, mainlining every channel with maximum data, leaves no room for imagination. Bandwidth will never exceed experience the way a good ghost story does. The 4-dimensional deluge puts us to sleep. But still we jump at shadows.
Text by David Teh
(1) Jacques Derrida, Spectres of Marx, 1994
David Teh Biography
David Teh is an independent critic and curator based in Bangkok. He studied critical theory at the Power Institute, University of Sydney, receiving his PhD in 2005. He has lectured widely on the history and theory of art and visual culture, with emphases on postmodern theory and new media cultures. He has contributed to numerous journals, newspapers and magazines including Art Asia Pacific, Art & Australia, Eyeline and The Bangkok Post. In 2006, Teh co-curated Platform, a showcase of emerging Thai installation artists (The Queen’s Gallery and The Art Center, Chulalongkorn University), and was a moderator of Cultural Ecologies: Communicating Contemporary Art in the 21st Century at the Asian Cultural Co-operation Forum in Hong Kong. He is also co-founder and moderator of the Fibreculture forum for internet culture, and a director of Chalk Horse Gallery, Sydney. He is currently the curator of the 5th Bangkok Experimental Film Festival (supported by MAAP-Multimedia Arts Asia Pacific).
Details of Work
Dislocation
2005
4 x 8 m, MDF, Plywood, LCD Monitors, Speakers, Amplifiers, Video Hardware,
Computer Hardware, Custom Software
Commissioned by Experimenta Media Arts
Supported by Viewsonic, Altronics
Alex Davies Biography
Alex Davies b.1977, Sydney, Australia. Currently resides Linz, Austria. Exhibitions include Re:search / Art collaboration of Australia and Japan, Sendai Mediatheque, Japan (2006); Platform, The Art Center, Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok (2006); Dislocation, FACT Liverpool, UK (2006); Flutter, Artspace, Sydney Australia (2006); Grudge Match, Gertrude Contemporary Art Spaces, Melbourne, Australia (2006). Awards include Australia Council Inter-Arts Board Grant (2007); Sendai Meditheque Japan Commission (2006); Asialink Residency, Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok Thailand (2006); Australia Council Music Board Grant (2005); Australia Council Visual Arts And Craft Grant (2005).
Davies is a Sydney artist, currently based in Austria working with Time’s Up. Awarded a Bachelor of Fine Arts with Honours from the College of Fine Arts, University of N.S.W (2001), where he is currently a PhD Candidate, Davies has since been researching, developing and presenting audio-visual installations. Davies’ practice spans a diverse range of media including film, photography, network, realtime audio-visual manipulations and responsive installations; his current practice is based on around the development of evolving audio-visual installations in which individuals and dynamic environmental factors shift the conditions of a controlled space.