Records and Wireframes: NEON Festival, CentreSpace, Dundee Contemporary Arts, Dundee

Wireframe Valley (remade, 2017) was selected for inclusion within a joint exhibition with Paul Walde. Wireframe Valley (remade, 2017) is a real time simulation landscape that gradually decays to reveal its wireframe basis over the duration of the exhibition. It is not video or film, but a software p...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Dolan, Paul
Format: Text
Language:unknown
Published: 2017
Subjects:
Online Access:https://nrl.northumbria.ac.uk/id/eprint/39946/
https://northeastofnorth.com/event/records-and-wireframes/
Description
Summary:Wireframe Valley (remade, 2017) was selected for inclusion within a joint exhibition with Paul Walde. Wireframe Valley (remade, 2017) is a real time simulation landscape that gradually decays to reveal its wireframe basis over the duration of the exhibition. It is not video or film, but a software program created with a game engine. The duration changes depending on the length of the exhibition. In this case, it was screened for 14 days. Records and Wireframes presents moving image works by artists Paul Dolan (UK) and Paul Walde (Canada) alongside skeletal remains of the extinct Tasmanian Tiger, on loan from the collection of the University of Dundee’s D’Arcy Thompson Zoology Museum. Curated for NEoN by artist Kelly Richardson to accompany her exhibition at DCA, ‘The Weather Makers’, ‘Records and Wireframes’ explores themes around climate change and screen culture with allusions to the past, present and future. In the expansive video installation Requiem for a Glacier (2013), Paul Walde memorialises British Columbia’s Jumbo Glacier, or “Qat’muk”, now under immediate threat from global warming and resort development. The work shows a four-movement oratorio performed by an orchestra and chorus atop the area’s Farnham Glacier. Over thirty-seven minutes, Requiem for a Glacier features panoramic glacier views alongside the oratorio that was composed by converting data such as temperature records for the area, into musical notation. The theme of disappearing landscapes, and data as a form of media archaeological artifact, continues in Paul Dolan’s real-time video work, Wireframe Valley (2017), which presents the gradual disappearance of a digitally constructed landscape, revealing its virtual origins. The defining features of the landscape degrade over the exact duration of the exhibition. In the context of global warming, where the physical planet is increasingly incapable of sustaining life as we know it, our refuge amongst digital environments may not placate us for long. Should we fail to alter our course, ...