What, how and why - Steve Rushton

This piece is an 1080p HD animation video consisting of CG imagery created with algorithmically sourced noise textures, as well as modelled objects using shots that contrast vast open digital spaces with claustrophobic macro-lens compositions. The audio of the piece (taking cues from the visual) is designed to evoke a sense of reverie within the hallucinatory dislocation of techno-culture. This one channel video over the course of ~2 minutes serves as a conduit for the viewer to embrace the post-physical nature of being.

In researching the imagery to be used in this piece, I looked into the visual language of system design that informs the surfaces of information transfer; The actual physicality of the rare-earth circuit board, to a speculative analogy of data relationships. How the disruption of our relationship to space and time as our identities become perpetual and weightless additionally informed the visual. Also, the narrative space of the electronic music club was a strong basis for inspiration, as this ritualistic assembly acts as a hybridizing force between the electronic sound wave and the psyche, where norms of gender and sexuality become obsolete.

The central motivation around this video is the non-linearity of contemporary identity through digitally informed culture. We are at once in one place and many, achieving a sort of quantum entanglement with multiple selves existing simultaneously in the social media space, game space, planetary whatsapp, etc… and traversing time zones through google earth and discount air travel. This displaces a linkage to a specific geography and asserts a sense of immateriality with the physical world. Tethered to the technological strata, how much of us is left, and how much do we become the strata? When experience is compressed akin to a jpg, high frequency information becomes lost – so what is re-constituted from the quanta that is left over?