Decomposition for my Machinic Eye
In this photographic and textual installation, Felix Loftus constructs a poetic representation of the history and geography of the land of One Tree Hill Park in South London. We are drawn into the woods through a series of printed computational photographs which hang from above. These photographs of decaying parts of the wood are 2d textures torn away from their 3d form. They are nonhuman photographs, intended to be read by a computer, but instead, here they are presented to the viewer. The odd combination of detailed and impressionistic sections allow us to go in search of a sense of the woods, relinquishing a desire to know all. Here, Felix plays with and reveals the machinic component of human vision, the extent to which our human visual understanding of the world, including our visual memory of the world, is in part constituted by computational networks. Meanwhile plastic acorns and oak leaves continue to destabilise our sense of what is ‘real’ or ‘natural’.
A flickering screen then takes the viewer through a history of the woods in scatterings of text and digital imagery. These poetic fragments interrogate the Imperial history that manifests through the ecology of the park, while exposing the park's dependence on a history of protest, truancy and communal practices that offer hope for the future.
A flickering screen then takes the viewer through a history of the woods in scatterings of text and digital imagery. These poetic fragments interrogate the Imperial history that manifests through the ecology of the park, while exposing the park's dependence on a history of protest, truancy and communal practices that offer hope for the future.