LIFESPANS: FOREVER AND EVER Part 1

This group exhibition curated for NEoN by Weave by Abertay brings together works of gaming and design, alongside other hybrid creations that reflect on the endlessness and expansive nature of our digital lives. Cassie McQuater’s game, Black Room, explores infinite spaces and weird dreams you might have when you fall asleep at your keyboard. Hadi Mehrpouya and Robert Powell’s work is a series of prints and a unique ‘search engine’ that invites you to identify your internet ailments such as Data Diarrhoea or Infolepsy; a Google-esque spiralling symptom-search of some invented techno-diseases.

The significant early networked game “The Endless Forest” by Tale of Tales is a meditative repose, perhaps a remedy to the neverending digital deluge, as you roam aimlessly around a beautiful landscape in the form of a deer. In this exhibition, you can go from being lost in the woods, to a new state of self-awareness through the generative work of designer Marius Watz’s large scale colourful geometric wall prints. UCracking shows what happens when you break on through, and interrupt the cycle of the algorithm, fracturing and ‘cracking’ up virtual space.

About the artists

Tale of Tales (BE) – Auriea Harvey and Michaël Samyn met online in the romantic age of cyberspace. Separated by an ocean they created applications that allowed them to touch among the wires. Samyn and Harvey are currently remaking The Endless Forest so that it can live another decade and provide a new generation of players with a joyful haven in cyberspace.

Cassie McQuater (USA) – is a new media and video game artist currently living and working in Los Angeles, CA. Her practice involves hours of surfing the net, mining for digital artefacts and repurposing them as a way to reflect on and reinvent our relationship with interactive storytelling.

Marius Watz (NO) – is an artist working with computer code as a creative material to produce bold geometric abstractions based on algorithms. He has exhibited widely internationally and is a lecturer in interaction design at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design.

Hadi Mehrpouya (UK) – is a lecturer in computer games technology at Abertay University and digital artist. His research interests are in Science and Technology Studies. He is currently finishing his PhD at University of Edinburgh looking at the role of search engines and social media in how we acquire and disseminates knowledge.

Robert Powell (UK) – is an award-winning visual artist based in Edinburgh. His etchings are designed to provoke a laughter that verges on panic. His most recent solo exhibition was Between the Lost Places at the Fine Art Society in Edinburgh which took as theme cartography and travel.