Joe Neil

As we face the Singularity, and the handful of billionaires chasing God-like power, I scrutinise technology’s role in centralising power for the highly privileged – elevating them above other humans, animals and environments. I look to porosity and the long-time merging of different beings as the true driver of evolution, framing evolution as a mutual process of collaborative becoming, rather than ascension towards divinity.

Drawing inspiration from artists and writers exploring how advancements in technology will alter and mediate our relationship with the more-than-human world – such as Pierre Huyghe, James Bridle and Anicka Yi – I use cast concrete, plaster, generative projection and installation work to make speculative artefacts suggesting an alternative past, or far future. Objects or spaces where the hierarchy these techno-elites enforce is dissolved by time; where an ironic form of the immortality they seek is achieved through the return of all to stone.

My work is intentionally paradoxical with visual representations of fossils, monuments, and advanced technologies appearing in the same space. Digital processes such as 3D printing and LIDAR scanning cause the digital to leave physical marks on my work, representative of the increasingly blurred boundary between the physical and digital world. With a heavy focus on carefully rendered texture and the methods of prop making, my work aims to quickly submerge the viewer in another world, as if turning a movie on half-way through.

The Fountain of Youth, the spring or river whose waters restore vitality to anyone who drinks or bathes in it, is one of the most persistent myths, equally in Western and non-Western cultures. This legendary place is the physical manifestation of the human desire to arrest time, to grasp control in a world of decay. Pursuit of The Fountain represents fear, faith, desire and the lust for power.

In a contemporary world experiencing the effects of rapid technological advancement – where the promises of many tech giants already appear as magic or science fiction – our most powerful elites no longer place their faith in the conquistador discovering The Fountain in uncharted lands: the modern day immortalists are searching for divine power within technology.

The Fountain I’ve depicted is a violent, desolate and precarious one. The centaur form – the hybrid – built from human, animal and technological bodies represents the reality of the human assemblage. In opposition to The Singularity being the final step in human ascension above nature, here the entire process of evolution is in the encounter with the Other. Hierarchy has dissolved, and our entanglement is more evident than ever now that this suspended body has mineralised into one inseparable form.

Perhaps this is the site of the first successful immortalists, or a shrine to the failed mission. Reflected in the watery threshold, the place appears to exist on the boundary between life and death: legacy’s immortalised in rock; ritual objects, both technological and biological, appear to be taking their first steps out of a primordial ocean, or succumbing to the flood that will return them to it; the only system truly “alive” is the machine scrambling to understand its physical world.

DEGREE SHOW – The Fountain of Youth