Genesis (What Can’t Light See?), 2021
Single Channel HD video,
9:30mins
Camera assistance: Lydia Davies
3D modelling: Jay Mulholland
At music concerts, audio-visual nodes are designed to mirror and exacerbate both the plural ecstatic experiences of bodies and increasingly the technology attached to them. Here, collective and personal images, technological and human bodies, become confused. Inspired by an absurd and biblical story by Peter Gabriel, Genesis indulges in moments of ‘switch’ and explores our relationship to artificial light. The artefacts and appropriated characteristics of modernist design in the video form the edges of a world built on convoluted references, while the decidedly twee Englishness of Gabriel’s fable help reinvent electricity and light in moral terms. The wriggling motif of our friend the worm allows us to penetrate and embrace the darkness, emancipating our flesh from normative modern time, space and sensation.