'maintenance of social solidarity' [solo large scale, multi-media installation]. Contemporary Art Services Tasmania (CAST)

Abstract

Maintenance of social solidarity is one in a series of projects where et al. looks at mind control in its various manifestations; social, medical, industrial and cultural. Curator Bryony Nainby. Contemporary Art Services Tasmania is assisted by the Australia Council, the Federal Government’s arts funding and advisory body, and through Arts Tasmania by the Minister for the Arts.CAST is supported by the Visual Arts and Craft Strategy, an initiative of the Australian, State and Territory Governments. Bryony Nainby An installation by et al is an experiential encounter with an excess of reality, of aspects of human history and knowledge. The blurring of content – the handwritten texts and scrawled notes, the tables and electrical equipment, the computer programming, the sound mixes, the philosophical speculations, political speeches and fanatical ranting interspersed with poetic quotations and other assorted extracts… all merge together to absorb, even confound, the viewer. Technology both as medium and as subject is an important aspect in the work of etal. It raises issues such as conformity, oppression and surveillance in contemporary society. Working with the idea of ‘trace’ and ‘memory’, etal. employs processes of collection and recollection as a means of social and institutional critique in order to explore the connection between fact and myth. The fact that we pick and choose from a constant proliferation of data, hypotheses and ideas to bolster – nay, come to terms with our very existence, is a basic premise behind the role played by texts, voices and images in an etal installation. The projects draw attention to and comment on the ideologies and orthodoxies we, perhaps unwittingly, are conditioned by: they explore the nature of truth and meaning, question notions of 'witnessing', and critique fundamentalist tendencies. And there's always the dead grey room, a zone of sorts, with its cacophony of preaching voices, orchestrated noise, a blurring of words, music and texts stuttering across wonky screens, often ill-registered and deliberately distorted. Orations, citations, go hand in hand with a fundamental fact: our freedom to choose what we wish to see and hear. But given the all-powerful media we are subjected to on a daily basis, our utter susceptibility to bureaucratic controls and our gullibility to all forms of visual/ mental imaging, these strange set-ups with their flickering electronic displays, persuasive voices and slapdash but insightful signboards, the question is posed: just how free can we be?