david blandy
15/5/24- 20/5/24
David Blandy will be showing two films, Androids Dream (2022) & How to Fly (2020), alongside his collaborative world-building game Gathering Storm (2022).
In Androids Dream (2022), Blandy deconstructs the cyberpunk aesthetic first prototyped by Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984) and Scott’s Blade Runner (1982), and which has continued to be repeated and become ever more ossified. Formed of multiple simulacra, the work involves Unreal Engine assets, uses Kojima’s Snatcher - itself a replay of Blade Runner in videogame form - and even deploys an algorithmic mimesis of the artist's own voice. Breaking down the aesthetic form, the film in turn breaks down, repeats, refracts, and goes into reverse. Commissioned by Petra Szemán for On Animatics for Saturday Morning Animation Club.
How to Fly (2020) was commissioned by John Hansard Gallery, Southampton as part of their video programme in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic to reflect on uncertain times. The film, made inside the Grand Theft Auto 5 game engine, shows the audience How to Fly obliquely references the present moment, while also pointing to new potentials. This piece builds on a series which uses the form of online video tutorials to explore ideas around patterns in nature and existence. Each of them begins with Blandy giving a step-by-step tutorial explaining how to make a short video about a specific subject, only using the tools available via a computer – through the Internet and video editing software to video games. Commissioned by John Hansard Gallery, Southampton.
Gathering Storm (2022) is a collaborative world-building game made by Blandy, developed from his research around food, agriculture and colonial histories using voice, writing and drawing to imagine new worlds and societal systems collaboratively. Creating communities together through collaborative map-making and story-telling. Participants consider how, through contemporary art and gaming, we can explore questions of colonial histories and anti-colonial futures. Created whilst Blandy was a UK associate for Delfina Foundation’s The Politics of Food programme, Season Five.
David Blandy Bio
David Blandy (1976, UK, Lives & works in Brighton) makes work that slips between performance and video, digital and analogue, investigating the stories and cultural forces that inform and influence our lives. Collaboration is central to his practice, examining communal and personal heritage and interdependence. With research spanning multiple forms of archive, from fandoms to the archive of the body, historic texts to academic libraries, archaeology and ecological theory, twitch streams and film archives, Blandy weaves poetic works that explore the complexities of the contemporary subject.
He is represented by Seventeen Gallery, London.
His films are distributed by LUX, London.
Instagram: @david_blandy_
