New Dawn
Increasingly today our expectation and definition of freedom is being muddied with our need for greater accessibility and functionality; our passwords are remembered by Google, our plane tickets stored by Apple, our photos owned by Facebook. As the operating systems we use to interface our interaction with the world update (so that as we have freer and unimpeded access) the more our personal data is owned by corporations and held within their sprawling, subterranean server farms, mockingly stylised as ‘the cloud’.1 Our actions are increasingly more distanced and remotely enacted by software—through ‘signing’ verbose terms and conditions and regular day-to-day usage, the user has generated a latent, complicit agreement surrounding the legality and pervasiveness of these practices.
For Brisbane-based artist Chris Howlett, society’s immersed position within technology and virtual communities offers a unique opportunity to create art from new perspectives. Howlett’s two new exhibitions share one name—New Dawn, inspired by the artist’s channel surfing between two similar, but geographically distant, news stories. At Boxcopy, New Dawn features a looped four channel video work, presented on a custom-built, abstract lightning-bolt-shaped plinth. Scuttling between found news footage and in-game video, the mostly low resolution images float in a flat, moving grid. Cel shading is applied to give a graphic novel quality. Sources vary and mass content battles for primacy. The images are incredibly diverse; Grand Theft Auto 4 modded characters of Homer Simpson, Mickey Mouse, a Stormtrooper and jihadist, run through a CGI version of Times Square; stills of Langley, the CIA’s headquarters; Chelsea Manning; Edward Snowden as Where’s Wally; a Guy Fawkes mask; an Old Spice deodorant ad; kids firing assault rifles; an Assassin’s Creed 3 game jostling with user