HALL OF MOUNTAINS 30 April - 31 May 2009 Special late night opening: George Morris presents a new site specific installation along with selected print and video work by George Morris. Morris' practice considers the built environment, digital aesthetics and related representational issues. His work has recently focused upon the proliferation of non-physical, networked data space in relation to an increase in banal 'non-place', physical urban environments. Anthropologist Marc Augé identified specific urban physical spaces which facilitate some interaction or transmission but have very little in the way of a sense of tangible 'place' as understood by 20th century anthropological study. These spaces are typified by the technological interfaces of ATM machines, computer workstations and mobile phone activity, but also by banal, transitory waiting rooms such as airline departure lounges and corporate reception areas which frequently serve as repositories for our physical mass whilst we intellectually occupy a remote networked 'dataspace' through our digital devices. Data space, networked space, online space, cyber space; all of these expressions relate to non-physical, timeless, placeless states. In stark contrast to the increasingly immobilising confines of physical urban space, data space is typically represented in media and advertising imagery using luminescence and the perspective of seemingly boundless space. Data space is marketed using the visual language of the romantic and the sublime to associate remote communications with the promise of limitless freedom. This is effectively an inversion of the former concept of the sublime. The vastness and unknowability of the 'natural' world and mans yearning to somehow belong to it is replaced, instead, with the vastness and unknowability of the seemingly limitless amounts of data available online: the desire to be, at the very least, connected to such a space with all of it's potential information / content.
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