UBIK with Changeable Beast at Hypha Gallery Space, Stratford, London
February 2025
Sunspots 2025, Monitors, clear resin, polystyrene balls, spray paint, grey sand
Size: 3m length x 2.5m width x 30 cm
Three medium to large monitors lie horizontally on the floor, creating a "consumer throwaway" landscape. The screens display looping videos of small, digitally created, pulsating suns that appear and disappear randomly. Interspersed with these are montaged visuals of scratches, dust, and flickers of moving lights, forming an ever-changing surface/ landscape. The videos are filtered through an orange/pink hue, emitting a kind of artificial sunshine. The screens themselves act as portholes to other spaces and worlds, dissolving the boundary between physical and digital realms. Their looping imagery—pulsating suns, flickering lights, and layered distortions—suggests shifting dimensions, as if each monitor opens a temporary window into an artificial yet strangely familiar terrain. A low-volume audio track accompanies the visuals—a mix of insect cicadas and electrical buzzing sounds.
Cacti are placed on the monitors, positioned over the pulsing sun circles as though drawing energy from the synthetic sunlight. Appearing and disappearing amongst the suns are small tracker lights that sweep across the screens, evoking a surveillance presence—an unseen force monitoring the artificial landscape.
Cast in clear/translucent resin, the cacti (3–5 inches tall) allow the video beneath to remain visible. The casts are embedded in pools of resin. Orange-sprayed polystyrene balls, along with a miniature key ring billiard ball marked with the number 3, are scattered throughout the composition—suggesting scaled-down toy suns or remnants of a child’s game left unfinished.
Light grey man-made aggregate/sand is dispersed around the monitors, reinforcing the sense of an artificial desert—an environment that mirrors the synthetic realm of the screens.
Inspired by Philip K. Dick’s UBIK, where the mysterious entity is described as a divine force capable of creating everything—including the sun—this installation plays with themes of creation, control, and illusion. The proliferation of cacti, with their upright, resilient forms, alludes to a phallic, god-like power, thriving within an artificial ecosystem. These otherworldly plants, suspended in resin, exist in a liminal space—both organic and synthetic, both present and obscured. The scratched screens, their surfaces marked by traces of wear, create a tension between invitation and obstruction, reinforcing UBIK's ambiguous nature: a world where reality is fluid, constantly shifting between what is seen and what is hidden.
February 2025
Sunspots 2025, Monitors, clear resin, polystyrene balls, spray paint, grey sand
Size: 3m length x 2.5m width x 30 cm
Three medium to large monitors lie horizontally on the floor, creating a "consumer throwaway" landscape. The screens display looping videos of small, digitally created, pulsating suns that appear and disappear randomly. Interspersed with these are montaged visuals of scratches, dust, and flickers of moving lights, forming an ever-changing surface/ landscape. The videos are filtered through an orange/pink hue, emitting a kind of artificial sunshine. The screens themselves act as portholes to other spaces and worlds, dissolving the boundary between physical and digital realms. Their looping imagery—pulsating suns, flickering lights, and layered distortions—suggests shifting dimensions, as if each monitor opens a temporary window into an artificial yet strangely familiar terrain. A low-volume audio track accompanies the visuals—a mix of insect cicadas and electrical buzzing sounds.
Cacti are placed on the monitors, positioned over the pulsing sun circles as though drawing energy from the synthetic sunlight. Appearing and disappearing amongst the suns are small tracker lights that sweep across the screens, evoking a surveillance presence—an unseen force monitoring the artificial landscape.
Cast in clear/translucent resin, the cacti (3–5 inches tall) allow the video beneath to remain visible. The casts are embedded in pools of resin. Orange-sprayed polystyrene balls, along with a miniature key ring billiard ball marked with the number 3, are scattered throughout the composition—suggesting scaled-down toy suns or remnants of a child’s game left unfinished.
Light grey man-made aggregate/sand is dispersed around the monitors, reinforcing the sense of an artificial desert—an environment that mirrors the synthetic realm of the screens.
Inspired by Philip K. Dick’s UBIK, where the mysterious entity is described as a divine force capable of creating everything—including the sun—this installation plays with themes of creation, control, and illusion. The proliferation of cacti, with their upright, resilient forms, alludes to a phallic, god-like power, thriving within an artificial ecosystem. These otherworldly plants, suspended in resin, exist in a liminal space—both organic and synthetic, both present and obscured. The scratched screens, their surfaces marked by traces of wear, create a tension between invitation and obstruction, reinforcing UBIK's ambiguous nature: a world where reality is fluid, constantly shifting between what is seen and what is hidden.
