Steel cage, video footage of birds, monitor, plotter, pencil, paper

200 cm x 300 cm x 200 cm

2009

'Flux' is an installation comprised of an enlarged Victorian birdcage containing a monitor displaying a flock of birds in motion and a plotter that attempts to draw the bird’s movements. The cage is based on a Victorian design, referring to a time of industrial change and imperial values. The monitor is in the style and display format of an information screen seen at airports, railway stations and waiting rooms. The aesthetic is of the very immediate present whilst its function suggests the promise of the future and the transience of the now. The cage also houses a plotter, an early automated drawing device, made redundant by ink jet printers, a product of the not so distant past, part of the almost now.

The plotter has its drawing pens replaced with pencils and, using computer programming and surveillance techniques, the birds movements are recorded and outputted to the plotter. The program and software is, however, only able to function in a very narrow way. Recording the movement of an isolated object against a back round of a different colour it is accurately able to map the movements of the object. However when given the task of tracking a number of objects simultaneously the technology breaks down, unable to replicate nature as it so often promises but instead creating an abstraction of nature that exists as a reality in it’s own right, a reality where nature and technology are integrated. The piece aims to play on the entrapment of the subject within a flux of different times and genres of identity. The technology of yesterday trying to keep up with the transience of now, dreaming of tomorrow but entrapped within the architecture and values of the past, where freedom exists through the interface.