This project takes the film theorist’s Leo Charney’s notion of the ‘drift’ as a point of departure to build upon this notion and to work around this central question: how does the drift materialise in today’s technological disposition? Charney envisions the drift as an “ungovernable, mercurial activity,” teeming with possibilities and heterogenous in tone, drift enables one to sense the vertigo-laden uncertainty of the present. Following this philosophical mediation, drift splits along two tracks as both an ontology and an epistemology. In its ontological becoming, drift traces the relative emptiness of the everyday as "presence irrevocably becomes absence."
Drift as epistemology attempts to capture the mere feeling of time - the perception of time's flight and fragmentation - giving shape to what is essentially formless. In mutual reverberation, this project explores the drift as a pervasive atmosphere of information and our ability to process this with our own internal rhythm of interpretation. This exhibition attempts to specify this drift with greater accuracy, to give a sense of this drift happening as something tactile, as a condition, pacing, as something enfolding in everything else. In our technological disposition, this drift feels like the simultaneous dissolution of presence in wake of the overwhelming presence of everything.
Curator Annabel Brown
Amalia Lindo, The Cloud is of the Earth, 2021, single-channel video installation, audio, 17”, liquid-crystal display panel, LCD controller board, mild steel, 140 x 160 cm, 8 mins 29 secs. Photo: Christo Crocker.