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For this screening, the artist presents new and recent works, accompanied by a discussion and Q&A.

Laura O’Neill’s animated videos occupy a hinterland of audio-visual excess. Working predominantly with CGI imagery, she weaves personal narratives through abstract and fluctuating alternative realities. Political players and tabloid news frequently populate worlds filed with bulbous characters and unknown creatures. O’Neill’s videos are visually and technically complex, her precise soundtracks mix music from various sub- and club-cultures that drift in and out of earshot in abstract unison; the intertwined nature of video and audio building into consuming and impactful experiences.

  Again Again Again (we eat the world and the world eats us), 2018, HD video, colour, sound, 8 min 31 sec

                      

Hands glued together in an eternal handshake: as a tool or a weapon, this gesture reveals implicit power structures. Meanwhile, we move our cursors up and down, left and right, influenced by consumptive induction and technological ritual. Rather than location, navigation has now become primary: trans-action after trans-action, witnessed or unwitnessed. Proliferating variations regulate our relationships. Enunciations come in and out of focus. One becomes the other. Words speak by themselves from a pantomimed background. Hand in hand we’re maneuvered. But who is steering whom? And who wants to be guided? We subconsciously live in fear of overlapping power structures that make up our reality: from the most intimate to the all-encompassing and global. Resistance acts out, evoking a moment when an object loses its function. Simulations influence our inner fictions, affect how we act upon the external world. We obscure the face, creating another mask.
Welcome to the City of Tomorrow: the place of prolonged lives and digitized souls, where bodies are disposable and eternal life is possible—but only for those who can afford to make a copy.