GEV I : Pedestrian Simulator (v)

One of three projections representing attempts to predict the experience of human existence

The fundamental codes of a culture - those governing its languange, its schemas of perception, its exchanges, its technigues, its values, the hierachy of its practices - establish for every man, from the very first, the empirical orders with which he will be dealing and within which he will be at home. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things, 1966

One of three projections exploring facets of the symbolic order imposed on human experience of the world, God’s Eye View both celebrates and questions the wisdom of attempting prediction.

Enlisting the aid of the Met office and the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis, these works offer up the mechanisms employed for the visual mapping of the virtually invisible for consideration. Struck by the inadvertent beauty of systems created to ease understanding of a complex world, Cotterrell here replicates the language of predictive modelling to highlight what is lost (and gained) through the process of translation.

Red dots, each representing a human life, dash to and fro: bunching together in ‘desirable’ spaces, leaving others abandoned. At times, the audience is reminded of the behaviour of flocking birds or lemmings as we see human choice and naturally occurring patterns reduced to game-like conditions.The quest for God-like status is brought down to earth by the limitations imposed by humanity’s collective imagination: prediction machines are only capable of replicating identified trends. Our inability to witness all of the convolutions of behaviour is reduced to an abstraction: a translation or ‘Beginner’s Guide’ to this shared existence.

Materials:

MDF, Data Projector, AppleMac and x86 Computers

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