INFORMATION SUPERHIGHWAY (EXCERPT)
Three Channel Moving Image
Three HD Videos, Duration: Dependant on destination
2021

Matthew Cosslett — INFORMATION SUPERHIGHWAY (EXCERPT)
Three Channel Moving Image
Three HD Videos, Duration: Dependant on destination
2021

Matthew Cosslett

Matthew works in digitally expanded definitions of the image. Working across disciplines through video, photography, text, and sound, Matthew moulds expanded image realities as material to probe and inhabit the intersection between image and individual in the digital age. To this end, digitally ephemeral archives are key material, from Youtube videos to discarded hard drives of family photographs. Algorithms and other expanded new-cameras are also used to create a deep toolkit to combine the network with the local and interrogate the ‘now’ of our informational-image culture.

Often using Scotland as an imagined landscape, Matthew projects the seemingly divergent realities of the network atop loaded landscapes in order to explore how we build meaning in dirt and in data. Questioning the layering of images over landscapes and transmuting the network atop imagined places, he doubles and destabilises visual assumptions, holding meshes of contradictory information and highlighting flash-blown-out faces in order to build a new visual language for the image and for ourselves.

Matthew’s work explores the new image reality and how we experience real and imagined space with an honest and forgiving eye. It aims to not disavow the local or the human and sees our relationship to place and landscape as a locus of an image-individual nexus.

The A77 is a network upon which packets and bundles of information and goods flow between Scotland and Northern Ireland. Beginning over water in Glasgow, the A77 runs south to the ferry ports of Cairnryan before running out to the sea again at its end in Portpatrick. It is one of the most dangerous roads in the country.

This timeline, the A77, diverts itself alongside the dense geological formations of the ‘Ballantrae Complex’, a time map that forms the coastline between Girvan and Ballantrae. On this section of the A77 sits ‘Kennedy’s Pass’, a few mile stretch where the road struggles to cling to the violent, varied and dense rocks that envelop it.

The Electric Brae is a section of road stretching a quarter-mile between Croy railway viaduct and Craigencroy Gen. At the Electric Brae, place your car into neutral, remove your handbrake, and you will roll uphill. Take your foot off the pedals, place a ball, pour some water, it too will roll uphill. In a time of technological anxiety, when electricity expanded across Scotland, the Victorians incorrectly understood the brae as born from this new network of currents sped above and below the topography of rural landscapes; ‘electric’. In truth it is the hills themselves that electrify the brae, simultaneously defining and destabilising the reality of the road, the network.