-Before I head in I'm warned about the frequency and noise in the installation. Pregnant women and children are advised to use ear defenders. The nightmare thrum of machinery, of sterility; like an intense extractor fan moving or processing the air. Sudden stopping, and the silence brings with it a slight anxiety or elation, before the machine gun rhythm picks up again. It is 'active' sound, noise that tells you something is happening to you, to the space.
-The room so white and void you know you are awake. For a moment I worry about leaving a track of footprints.
-In a cubby behind glass, a hospital or care home meal tray. As if damaged, or malformed, or mis-remembered- slightly reminiscent of the uncanny-valley nature of early AI imagery, presented something familiar yet changed. Sickly in nature also- sugar cubes, a plate of possibly gelatin, glasses of milk- at least as I interpret it, easily could be glasses of glue, cubes of styrofoam, a plate of half-molten plastic.
-Ubiquitous white plastic woven tonne sacks, the sort I work with every day, see on trucks, in yards, in skips, now a sort of ritual mat, protecting or presenting a metal plate, its essence bleeding out into the sculpture around it. These plates reminiscent of the kind used in catering in hospitals, prisons, or used as a container in kitchens- or used in surgery, the mortuary, for things malignant or precious to be carried in, or soiled and failed tools to be discarded in with a 'clink'.
-Objects with the sensation that they have been mined out of somewhere, the organic and the factory mould crossing over. Mined from a mind.
-An archaeological discovery of a culture finished, or the malforms of a technologic civilisation struggling to be born.
-Elsewhere fragments sit framed in trays, seemingly rusting or degrading, leaving only hints and impressions of what they were or could have been.
-Incomplete and suggestive sections of some bigger machinery with unknowable agendas and purposes. Are they to kill or keep alive. Do they take consent or inflict without appreciation of will.
-Screens taking and giving no data- just colours, an image of an inflating black bag, a reflection in a black screen. Props from a dream.
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-The inorganic tonne sacks replaced now with a wooden or bark weave, topped with black beans- harvested or shed- tumbling and falling onto all space apart from the attempted capture in the steel circle in the off-centre. Either no share given or all is shared. None taken, or all lost. What is shared is not the product, but the beauty of the weave.
Feelings/ words: Sterility, Inorganic Life, robotics, AI & data, Hardware, Creation & Degradation, Crystalline.
RAIN/RUIN by Phillip Lai at Spike Island, Bristol
