August 2026
This 'artist statement' you are reading (or listening to) resides in a data centre. I know that because I put it there. It has been brought to you via encoded signals from a western European country, but not the UK. Your consumption will leave a (possibly temporary) trace in your brain, which is your want. Your behaviour will also be recorded across numerous devices in digital infrastructures spanning multiple countries, which may not be your want.
It is easier this way, isn't it? No paper involved. Almost instantaneous 24/7 access to the latest version of my data (artist statement and artwork). Should you be interested. If not, there are lots of other data sources competing for your attention. Depends on what you are looking for. Where exactly you end up also depends on who is looking for you. This global digital infrastructure (the Internet) affects how we work, how we do 'leisure' and of course how we do art. It has increasingly penetrated into every corner of our experience and for that reason, its effect would seem be have a persuasive directional power over our aspirations and behaviours.
My artwork is an analysis of my experience working in IT for nearly 30 years. I use the objects and experiences that are part of what it is to live and work in the field of IT infrastructure as a conduit for critiquing the visible and invisible interactions of data and data processes which exist in all facets of our lives today. I use data cables, network cable ties, data centre servers, data centre cabinets and other detritus of the physical digital world as objects in my artwork. I sometimes accompany the physical with digital manifestations on monitor(s).
I use ready-made objects, diagrams and assemblages to subvert Information Technology's place in our daily lives, I attempt to transition the viewer into being aware of a relationship of partially hidden things (cables, data centres, Wi-Fi signals), which have a direct influence on their lives by being part of the larger technological dialectic of control. The work 'Liquid Trust' by Racheal Crowther and it's relationship to the liminal spaces of control is influential in my work of replicating data centres into art spaces. In addition, Barbara Kruger, Jenny Holzer and Mark McGowan's use of text is influential in my web based work which asks an important question but gives multiple inane answers as selectable options.
A writer who exposes infrastructure's relationship with social interactions (micro and macro) is Marina Vishmidt. In the essay Between Not Everything and Not Nothing: Cuts Towards Infrastructural Critique1, Vishmidt asks, since our social institutions depend on working infrastructures, can a rupture (a 'cut') in infrastructure refoundationalise what is possible for us in these social institutions?
It seems the infrastructure we have constructed around ourselves has an inordinately strong hand in shaping and directing our lives. An infrastructure we could possibly never chose to live without.
1 Vishmidt, Marina (2017) Between Not Everything and Not Nothing: Cuts Towards Infrastructural Critique. In: Former West: Art and the Contemporary After 1989. The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, pp. 265-269. ISBN 9780262533836. <https://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/23935/>. [Accessed August 2026], PDF document.