“Capital wears the mask of a natural force; it seems as solid as the earth itself; its movements appear as irreversible as tides; its crises seem as unavoidable as earthquakes and floods. Even when it is admitted that the power of Capital is created by men, this admission may merely be the occasion for the invention of an even more imposing mask, the mask of a man-made force, a Frankenstein monster, whose power inspires more awe than that of any natural force.” Freddy Perlman in The Reproduction of Daily Life, published 1969.
free sources of raw material considers how private human experiences are treated as such and a corporate vernacular is appropriated throughout. Technological advancements created a new age of capitalism in which surveillance operations govern the present economic model. Although today’s fears concerning the erosion of privacy due to the ubiquity of surveillance are not responses to a new phenomenon, they are a reaction to omnipresent and intensified information gathering technologies.
Today the daily transformation of living activity into capital can be both mediated by and carried out by active objects; under present-day conditions consumer goods can be stimulus through which people reproduce themselves and create capital; in the traditional sense consumer goods are spectacles and/or objects for passive admiration. These daily activities performed and recorded online take the form of labour and are marketable abstract activities. Under capitalism, marketability or saleability is the universal characteristic of all practical activity and products, human and creative activity take the form of computational products.
Sources namely found online are simulated by drawing on the language of commercial advertising and stock photography, utilising then puncturing this language becomes a way of analysing images and human activity as a form of currency that funds advertising and commercial outcomes. Artworks appear as outtakes from commissioned docu nature shoots and photographs shot specifically as ‘stock’—a transient and commercially driven subgenre. In their natural habitats the informational richness of such images discords with the imperative for the generic, symbolic and superficial. The works composing free sources of raw material inject an alternative, conceptual reading into the sources whilst simultaneously drawing interrelations between consumer pop culture and underside activity of the technological, digital landscape we inhabit today.
Exhibited as part of The Glasgow School of Art degree show in 2019
Install view of readymades and sculptures
LIVE EXPERIENCES, Digital image
Untitled, Digital image
Corporate Vernacular, Digital video, 30 seconds (looped)
Sculpture development
Untitled, Screen print on mirror, 30x30cm
Untitled, Pen drawings, Various sizes