What started out as an exhibition around the idea of astroturfing – think: fake crowds, crisis actors, stand-ins, psy-ops, AI girlfriends – moved more and more (back) towards the screenic – think: avatars, anons, doom scrolls, core core, portrait-mode ways-of-seeing.

The tether towards the screen is unyielding. every time we touch I get this feeling. The Screenic, al la Philip Brophy, is a liquid framework of media (iphones, video art [must not be boring], youtube, liveleak, VR, hollywood movies) is fundamentally porous and intersected with politics and culture. We watch videos of war on the same devices we use to text each other, slide into dms, watch puppet-making tutorials, troll anonymous forums, send reels, read substacks, capture the world. boring ahhh, exhibition text. The liberty to swipe and skip – tracing our finger, smudging the screen, feeling and indexing our way. We find ourselves incredibly fastened to the screenic, an eleventh finger, a third eye, a cloned voice. But always paradoxically at an ‘epistemic distance, aesthetic distance, and ontological distance’. A lag, time buffers – a small rupture that pulls our attention outwards. You reach out your fingers to run them across the tall grass but it’s astroturf.

You watch a video of rocks being re-hydrated. An invisible network of actors, coordinated agents, fingers caught in the margins of scans. Closed circuit loops. The works found here are bioluminescent – a soft blue light drawing us closer, as we run our fingers across the surface, it sparks and slowly washes over us. every time we touch I get this feeling brings together local artists from Naarm/Melbourne, Warrang/Sydney, Boorloo/Perth, and London-via-Sydney, who all engage in these ideas in playful, critical, and differential ways. Basically, I fw them all heavy. UwU.