Still Life With Platypus, a Fact initial commission, sees Theo Triantafyllidis and manufacturer and noise artist Slugabed browsing a series of progressively complex and surreal vanitases.
Though Still Life With Platypus marks the veryfirst time artist Theo Triantafyllidis and Slugabed have workedtogether, the London-based manufacturer’s particular noise hasactually affected Triantafyllidis’s work from the starting. “I love Slugabed’s music,” states Triantafyllidis, “it’s been a significant impact for me that has in some methods made it into some of my works, even however we hadn’t workedtogether inthepast.” The multi-faceted work is the mostcurrent version of the artist’s continuous experiments with real-time reactive visuals, as part of which he has workedtogether with Sun Araw on Velocity Holomatrix Warp 7, a completely playable, interactive experience, as well as with Giant Claw, on the video for ‘Until Mirror’. “I hadactually been establishing this system for live audiovisual efficiencies where I might have these scenes developed in a videogame engine, as well as a MIDI input and an audio input that gets plugged into the engine, that can then control all these graphics,” he discusses. “Together with some genuine time setsoff and secrets, I might be carryingout the graphics together with a artist. There is something fascinating about making both these audiovisual efficiencies and likewise stand alone videos where I wear’t have total control of how things are going, however it’s more like a cooperation with a system where we are both carryingout and the end outcome is more of a efficiency than it is a pre-recorded, extremely thoroughly timelined thing.” This freshly commissioned variation of Still Life With Platypus sees Triantafyllidis and Slugabed browsing a series of significantly complex and surreal vanitases, ultra high information assemblages of crab legs, apricot halves, mystical knight’s helmets, radiant mesh internet, lit cigarettes and tree trunks, as well as the titular Platypus, revolving and responding to Slugabed’s climatic rating.
Triantafyllidis’s fixation with the vanitas can be traced back to a much previously work, How To Everything, with which Still Life With Platypus, which was initially commissioned by Amsterdam’s NXT Museum, shares some lively DNA. In that work the artist tried to produce an algorithm that might create a intheory limitless series of aesthetically entertaining plans, a technological inversion of an creative type traditionally associated with more existential styles. “Traditionally utilized to refer to a type of still life painting popular in the Netherlands throughout the seventeenth century, the term ‘vanitas’ now explains art that practicesmeditation on the ephemeral character of earthly enjoyments and worldly achievements, and highlights the fragility of our desires in the face of the inevitability of death,” composes Triantafyllidis in a text accompanying How To Everything. Rather than a sombre monolith to the transience of life, How To Everything and Still Life With Platypus both represent the artist’s darkly amusing vision of the flattened, highly moderated, everlasting area of the now, what he explains as “devices, animals and plants all linked. Always on, constantly enhanced.” A continuously progressing contradiction made manifest, Still Life With Platypus overturns the conventional function of the vanitas and still life painting, avoiding the filled importance of daily items contrasted with skulls and gold coins and rather showing that, idea possibilities of computational art may be limitless, the flexibility to produce whatever doesn’t always have to mean anything. “Fragments of today’s web culture are dealtwith as archeological discovers that are repurposed to fit the requires of synthetic life,” composes Triantafyllidis. “YouTube ‘How To’ videos, trompe-l’œil, video videogame artifacts and computersystem graphic demonstrations notify this brand-new language of painting, hopping around the astonishing valley. The outcome is a perpetual orgy. Just like in genuine life.”
As with Triantafyllidis’s expeditions with computational humour in his live simulation and efficiency works, Still Life With Platypus serves as continual reflection on the complex nature of funny and the problems computersystems have with analysing and creating things that are really amusing. “I’ve been costs a lot of time reading all these researchstudy documents about computersystem researchers attempting to make a maker that informs a joke,” he states. “I’m attempting to believe about how they are attempting to totally deconstruct humour. Humour is this unusual thing that when you deconstruct it instantly stops being amusing and stops being efficient. This is an intriguing paradox.” Rather than effort to take it apart, Triantafyllidis remains tapped in to the nonstop orgy of life online, thoroughly organizing unreasonable assemblages highlighting the intrinsic, cosmic humour of web visualappeals. Though a computersystem may not be able to make you laugh on function, seeing it attempt is frequently even funnier. As Slugabed’s wonky synths stumble into movement and a ghostly arthropod moves overhead, Triantafyllidis’s techno-vanitases refuse to stay still. As snatches of regulated voices, detuned piano and squalls of sound reveal themselves, a virtual garden of fragile flowers flowers among a suspension of purple gloop. The titular platypus springs forth, its alittle upturned beak flashing an approximation of a smile, a understanding, anthropomorphic smile directed at whoever may be attempting to make any sense of its difficult environments. Better to unwind into the somnambulant sounds of Slugabed, float complimentary like the platypus you desire to see in the (physical) world.
For more details about Theo Triantafyllidis and his work you can follow him on Instagram and goto his site. You can discover Slugabed on Bandcamp and on Instagram.
Watch next: Theo Triantafyllidis Presents – Anti-Gone
.
