Steven Dickie
Deep in the forest, a fake fire burns
May 24th - 5th July
Steven Dickie presents Deep in the forest, a fake fire burns, a speculative fiction considering the entanglement of early material culture and our present networked world through narrative, museological display, sculpture and generative technologies.
The stories we tell have always shaped our futures. What happens when we are no longer the only ones telling the stories? When tales are formed by autonomous networked agents from the digested remnants of culture, language and meaning. Do new possibility emerge or are we locked in semantic collapse with the spectre of ideas past?
The exhibition considers what it means to make and encounter objects within a networked culture that simultaneously offers a decoupling from materiality alongside entanglement with complex global supply chains, infrastructures, extractive industries and globalised consumerism. It brings together a collection of works that span multiple domains. Archaeological objects, cartoonish faces, server racks, and 4K video piece together an alternative story of how we got to here.
Deep in the forest, a fake fire burns embodies the disconnect between the lightness of ephemeral digital experience and the deep thingness of networked life.
Across video, sculpture, technologies, and speculative fiction Steven Dickie’s work reflects sociological anxieties of networked life. With an ontologically flat framework, his works often connect disparate points in time through narrative structure and a broad materiality to navigate the complexities that nascent technologies bring to digital and real-world experience. These works often collapse in on themselves leaving us to make sense of the confusing world in which we find ourselves.
He has exhibited and screened his work throughout the UK and internationally including Glasgow International (UK); Casino Luxembourg (LU), Fremantle Arts Centre (AU), Catalyst Arts (NI), Glasgow Sculpture Studios (UK), Grand Union (UK), and NewBridge Project (UK), and most recently he has presented work with The Handbag Factory (UK), HilbertRaum (DE) and Goingaway.tv. He was awarded an Arts Council England International Fellowship in 2006, and he received an MFA from the Slade in 2010.