All the World's a Display

Fallacy of Composition
Screening series
Veinti4siete Galería, Avenida 7, Calle 15, San José, Costa Rica
31 August – 2 September 2017, screenings 7–10pm

i. Chris Paul Daniels and Sam Meech, One Square Mile, single-channel video (07:25), 2016
ii. Alan Warburton, (Experiment On) Experiment On A Bird In An Air Pump, HD computer-generated animation (04:08), 2015
iii. Alan Warburton, Training Camp, dual-channel HD computer-generated film (01:11), 2016
iv. Maud Craigie, Custom Made, single-channel video (15:01), 2016

The fallacy of composition is the error of assuming that what is true of a part must be true of the whole. It is the logic behind "one brick is light, so the wall must be light." Each film in this series sets up a system for understanding something large, such as a city, a body in motion or a relationship, by isolating, measuring or repeating one part of it. Each system works on its own terms, and each fails in revealing ways to reach the thing it set out to describe.

In One Square Mile, Chris Paul Daniels and Sam Meech build an elaborate system for reading an urban area. As the film goes on, its methods of surveying and mapping grow denser and more intricate. Yet the city itself gets no closer. The more precisely the system describes its square mile, the clearer it becomes that the place lies somewhere outside the measurements.

Alan Warburton's (Experiment On) Experiment On A Bird In An Air Pump takes its title from Joseph Wright of Derby's 1768 painting of a scientific demonstration performed for an audience. It brings the scene into the language of computer-generated imagery. Warburton's work often turns the tools of CGI back on themselves, and here the "experiment" is as much about the software as the subject.

In Training Camp, Warburton took a motion-capture file labelled "Gay" and applied it to a computer-generated Roman soldier. He then multiplied that soldier into an army, all repeating the same short loop in formation. The original movements were recorded by an unknown dancer following unknown directions. Repeated across the ranks, the gestures seem to take on the meaning of their label. The loop hardens into a type, and one anonymous body comes to stand for a category.

Maud Craigie's Custom Made was made during the Red Gate Residency in Beijing. It explores the relationship between mother and daughter. Over a broken Skype connection, Craigie asks her mother what it is they do together. She then hires a professional "mother" in Beijing to carry out those activities with her, shopping and eating together. The hired mother performs the recognisable actions of a mother without the substance of the relationship. The film shows how much of what we value is not in the actions at all.

Across the four films, surveying, replicating and substituting are ways of drawing a conclusion from a single unit, and each reveals the gap between the unit and the whole. By fixing on one measurable aspect of something much larger, each system shows what it cannot hold. Taken together, the series asks what escapes when we try to understand complex things through their data, their gestures or their performances. That question sits at the heart of my curatorial practice, in my work with collections and archives as much as with the moving image.