BREAKING, 2021, Online at www.cable-depot.com, in collaboration with Robert Good.

Behind the spectacle of the image is a virtual junk space of spam, conspiracy theories, fake news and surveillance stored in giant server farms. This is the debris of the failed and the repressed, a black economy of data and corrupted images, where agency is an illusion. Rage and fear are the new currency. BREAKING was an online only project that immerses the viewer into this fraught disconnect and confronts a new self that is fractured to the point of annihilation. The installation existed, but could only be experienced as mediated through the various platforms of the website: the 360 gallery experience, the security camera, the online video and the website. All these aspects constituted the work as it operates between the heat of the present and slowed down time of looking.

The gallery walls are lined with hundreds of collected Google News headlines, transforming the exhibition space into a claustrophobic and disorientating reverberation of claim and counter-claim. A computer screen plays a looped hypnotic video of a train journey in which back gardens and private spaces roll past, while the two synthetic voices, one male, one female, seemingly engage in a conversation that reveals itself to be an exchange of spam, news fragments, and extracts from Heaven’s Gate cult. The gallery floor is carpeted in electric green Astroturf, replacing our grounding in the ‘real’ world with a fictional space, in which the artificial is privileged. Not the hyper-reality of online, but its over-heated anti-chamber.

Cable-Depot Gallery live archive

Addicted to ECT Richard Ducker and Robert Good 2020

Presentation