SPLIT
Two person digital interactive artwork, television in split-screen format, light-box computer, bench, two wired controllers.
Duration variable.
2019

WASD
Realtime non-interactive artwork.
Dimensions projected, duration endless.
2018

Alistair Grant

b. 1990. Manchester.

Alistair Grant is based across Glasgow and Edinburgh. Master of Fine Art at Glasgow School of Art (2019). Grant founded The Number Shop – Studios and Gallery (Edinburgh) in 2014, and in his role as Director TNS hosted over sixty five exhibitions from visiting and resident artists. Grant co-founded Edinburgh Contemporary Art Directory in 2017, a bi-monthly printed (and social media) listings publication that presents contemporary art activity to the public from smaller artist run spaces to large scale institutions. Grant studied Fine Art Sculpture at Edinburgh College of Art 2009-2013.

Exhibitions: MFA Interim Show, Reid Building, Glasgow School of Art 2018, Odyssean Topographies, Hestercombe, Somerset, 2017, Odyssean residencies 2015, 2016. By End of Play, Glasgow Open House, 2017; MELON at The Number Shop, Edinburgh Art Festival, 2017; GOULASH at The Number Shop, Edinburgh Art Festival, 2016; Return Flight MEL-EDI, The Number Shop, Edinburgh, 2016; Primordial Soup at The Number Shop, Edinburgh International Science Festival, 2015; The Wild Project, Primary, Nottingham, 2014; Re-Wilding, Xero, Kline and Coma, London, 2014; Vstříc Divocine, Zdoňov, Czech Republic, 2013.

With one hand on the controller, the other waving hello, and third hand scratching the avatars head, Alistair Grant has one foot in the digital and the other two in the physical. Grant’s practice is ever increasingly orbiting the medium of video games and the hardware and software that build connections through the screen, cultivating a temporary fictive cohesion.

Lines of enquiry for the year have been:
People seeking connection across a networked divide and shifting multiplayer dynamics; The teleological trajectory of technology (inevitable continuous progress in consumer electronics) breeding a highly disposable artistic medium; Moments of pause/loading/UI screens as semi-diegetic intermediary second layers; Vitriolic intimacy in the pre/post competitive game lobby purgatory and moments of tenderness and vulnerability (Eddo Stern, Best Flamewar Ever 2007); The removed puppet master dynamic of maker==>player==>avatar, the narrowed possibility space moves closer towards a predetermined performance; Equally, the role of maker as expansive collaborator, walking hand in hand with the player, together sparking emergent moments of extreme cognitive agency; The 10/10 tragic self-seriousness of the ‘gamer’ aesthetic and its actually alluring technicolour sensuousness.