Free
Photo by Theo Ellison
The video Fancier features an absurdist faux-conversational monologue from a tearful feral pigeon – the omnipresent animal of London and Piccadilly Circus – as a reflection on Romanticism, technology and language.
The most immediate contact point is the overly-pristine uncanniness of CGI, as its attempt to mimic lens-based film and photography points towards the rapidly evolving state of images. As CGI continues to reverse engineer and reconstruct our reality, how will our relationship to images, objects and interactions change? Is it a race towards a computer-generated utopia or a solipsistic recreation of our own reality? Or something else?
Through anthropomorphism, the work both elevates and undercuts the image of the pigeon via its transformation into a romanticised flâneur who picks apart mundanity, self-obsession and its attachment to nostalgia that technology often amplifies. The video ends with the pigeon’s absurdist yet hopeful navel-gazing on the future in a post-lockdown world.
