The following is a brief preview - the full content of this page is available to premium users only.
Click here to subscribe...
With in the installation, oneWORLD, Ian Howard created a classic dystopian space. oneWORLD projected a nightmare vision filled with the terrors of technology and totalitarianism and as such it was designed to both demonstrate and critique the way in which a particular military culture has permeated our lives. While the installation offered much in the way of sharp political invective on the nature of militarisation, the question arises as to whether it was as much a critical response to this syndrome as it was yet another symptom of it? In fact, one could suggest that Howard runs the risk of propagating the very thing he sought to expose.
oneWORLD built upon the collective knowledge of the dystopian narrative and presented us with an Orwellian landscape of almost sublime proportions: a realm of darkness, chaos and confusion, illuminated only by occasional spots of light. In experiencing the space the viewer stumbled upon, and was confronted by, varying scenarios which served to demonstrate the pervasiveness of the 'military machine' within our world. We peered voyeuristically into small domestic interiors, into familiar everyday events, into a community surrounded and overshadowed by the technology of warfare. The space was littered with models of military hard ware, often in the most incongruous and disparate of settings, where bullets and bombers served as a bizarre form of interior decoration. This positioning of the domestic and the military, which was the at the very crux of the exhibition, exemplified how our culture has adopted a strangely passive acceptance of this rather savage state of affairs.
While the physical setting of the objects carried with it an element of the fantastic, the background hum of the television