I am a Scottish multidisciplinary artist based in Glasgow. Working primarily with moving image, I interrogate physical and digital topographies with expanded camera produced content— digital archives, generated imagery, and shot footage with re-contextualised music and found sound. Working in the space between individual and device, loaded with the desire to inhabit the other, I probe personal geographies and maps of internal sense making and deep feeling. Between media and the body I dredge the longing embedded in our engagement with technology and the narratives used to sell it to us.
Embodying cameras, emboldening camera shakes and body-limited perspectives, my work seeks to deconstruct the recorded material that makes up digital space. I often work with YouTube, alongside a deep well of sub-terrain technologies, like vocaloids to explore conspiracy, hope, and techno-utopian ideologies. Addressing the desire to see more I inhabit specific cameras that amplify their intent, such as recent work embodying the paranoid logic of the endoscope. Thinking of the camera as an object held I locate a body through the image and my work often lives in this shadow, in the slip that demonstrates that a person is responsible.
My practice uses the thick ideological web of the Scottish environment as analogue to digital topographies. In navigating landscapes, both digital and actual, that are obscured by forces of extraction, capital, industry, and tourism, my work questions the camera’s role in extraction and in imposition. I often work with geolocation to reintroduce the specific to the mass. Looking to how the hill and the signal shape each other I reintroduce the amorphicity of the network to its structure, holding technological infrastructure, like data-centres, to the logic of their content.
I often produce music for my work utilising the pull to feeling of music to disarm the platform’s capitalised emotional structures. Utilising ad-hoc, intimate, modes of production— my voice, instruments played improvisationally, and folk music. This ‘inside’ knowledge provides a reprieve, a reverie, to its technological counterpart, tensioned by physical display. Working with cruise ships, true crime, gambling, and karaoke, as empty vessels re-performed by us, I circle perpetual travel as an expansive physical metaphor for digital experience and moving image, and increasingly arrive at work addressing technological and actual death.