Objectless Expansion 2016
Meta, Twitter, DropBox and Windows are among countless tech corporations to employ cyan in their branding. With its implications of immateriality and limitlessness, this colour mystifies the material reality of digital technologies: sub-sea cables, data centres and fan-cooled servers.
For this installation, every surface of a gallery is painted cyan. A screen shows a virtual rendering of the same gallery, multiplied infinitely. The soundtrack is the voice of a Skype user I contacted via an unsolicited request; he describes his apartment in a residential building in Beijing.
The title was coined by Joseph Schumpeter to describe Empire: it expands for the sake of expanding, dominates for the sake of dominating. This imperial conquest is echoed in Big Tech, whose objective is to expand endlessly, colonising the territories of time, attention and emotion.
Media : Houshold paint, HD video (5 mins)
Commissioner : Harpers Bazaar Art Arabia
Exhibitions : Division of Labour (Worcester), Galeria Nueva (Madrid), Christine Koenig Galerie (Vienna)
For this installation, every surface of a gallery is painted cyan. A screen shows a virtual rendering of the same gallery, multiplied infinitely. The soundtrack is the voice of a Skype user I contacted via an unsolicited request; he describes his apartment in a residential building in Beijing.
The title was coined by Joseph Schumpeter to describe Empire: it expands for the sake of expanding, dominates for the sake of dominating. This imperial conquest is echoed in Big Tech, whose objective is to expand endlessly, colonising the territories of time, attention and emotion.
Media : Houshold paint, HD video (5 mins)
Commissioner : Harpers Bazaar Art Arabia
Exhibitions : Division of Labour (Worcester), Galeria Nueva (Madrid), Christine Koenig Galerie (Vienna)