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Science Fiction and the Antinomy of Images

Peter Alwast

Adam Geczy
Eyeline 80
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‘As you see, we are humanoids, but we are different from you’

War of the Robots (1978)

 

While Science Fiction can lay claim to the most cited split infinitive (‘to boldly go where no one has gone before’), it is never noticed that the term itself, science fiction, is the most blatant of oxymorons. In principle, science does not permit of fiction. In general parlance at least (leaving aside irrational numbers or Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle), science is about facts and certainty, not invention and metaphor. But one of the compelling aspects of successful science fiction is how convinced we are of its premises, which are the effects of technology and population growth gone amuck. It is also a genre that reflects back to us the truth, albeit graphic and overblown, about the extent to which our lives are inseparable from the rationalisation of technology. The natural and the natural body are just imaginary categories on the sliding scale of technological mediation. In video, painting, drawing and photography, Peter Alwast explores these notions by confounding the division between the manual and the digital, the natural and the artificial. His work continually sets up visual conflicts and contradictions, achieved by creating a tension between two images or sequences within a work, or through juxtaposition. Everything in Alwast’s world is seen through a heavily filtered lens. It is a room of mirrors in which more than one mirror is askew.

Given its play of surfaces and mixed realities, Alwast’s work is closely tied to the early twentieth century technique of collage and its filmic equivalent, montage. When Picasso introduced a piece of chair caning to a painting in 1912 (Still Life... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline

Everything, 2008. Still, 3 channel HD video animation, 5min. Courtesy the artist, Ryan Renshaw Gallery, Brisbane and Gallery9, Sydney.

Everything, 2008. Still, 3 channel HD video animation, 5min. Courtesy the artist, Ryan Renshaw Gallery, Brisbane and Gallery9, Sydney.

Grandma And Me, 2013. Oil and Giclée print on canvas, 110 x 110cm. Courtesy the artist, Ryan Renshaw Gallery, Brisbane and Gallery9, Sydney.

Grandma And Me, 2013. Oil and Giclée print on canvas, 110 x 110cm. Courtesy the artist, Ryan Renshaw Gallery, Brisbane and Gallery9, Sydney.