Angelo Plessas
The Twilight Of The Idols
15 Jun 2012 - 22 Jul 2012
EVERY WEBSITE IS A MONUMENT
Private View Thursday 14th June 2012,6-9pm
15th June – 22nd July,
Friday-Sunday 12-6pm or by appointment
www.cellprojects.org
Cell Project Space presents a newly commissioned body of work by Angelo Plessas, in his first solo exhibition in the UK. The Twilight of the Idols is a presentation of the artists ongoing and adaptive project Every website is a Monument. A CYcLE CLUB Summer exhibition and a key project for the CYcLORAMA programme, Plessas’ work, although screen reliant, is a series of unique websites that present an interactive experience for the viewer with the moving image becoming a unique intimate artwork activated and played by the audience. Online works automatically have a greater and more immediate reach using the enormous speed of the Internet and creating a powerful social and what he describes as 'an open condition'. It's value never changes with scale – the same piece could be the size of a football pitch or fit onto the screen of a smart phone. Each work resists the concept of completion and its edges are ever elusive. His virtual world negates the pumped up hyperactivity of today’s computer animated games technology to offer a more fragmented abstract experience. Utilising simple shape and subtle electronic sound to represent landscape and characters offers a more contemplative game play.
The Twilight of The Idols,'a title taken from a publication with the same name by philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche touches on the artist’s working methods as much as the exhibition itself. Plessas finds inspiration from idleness and builds upon his experimentation with language and visual imagery from books to the vast landscape of online information. From his unconscious utopia to the everyday reality, reading, browsing, escaping, dreaming, and psychoanalysing he brings together philosophical and poetic themes, and combines them with an anthropomorphic fusion of computer animation and self-made percussive sound effects. The mathematical or physics based code which he either engineers or finds inside open-source websites is visualised with drawing techniques inspired by ancient, modern or post-modern iconography. A process of play by the audience is always needed to activate his works, however, for Plessas, audience participation touches on more urgent political themes of social engagement, which has the potential to subscribe into his own personalised brand of micro- utopianism.
(photo by Damian Jaques)
(photo by Damian Jaques)
