Video (16:28), motor, Arduino, iPhone 
*this work rotates from portrait to landscape*
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Shown as part of No One Is Bored, Everything Is Boring, Galleri Mejan, Stockholm, Sweden 🇸🇪.

This work was created following the development of the portrait/landscape system for Sorry Keys. After completing that piece, I wanted to explore the potential of the system further. I saw it as a way to create videos that are specifically tailored to smartphones, there functions, and our evolving relationship with them.

This led to the creation of a text-based video work that utilizes an app popular among chauffeurs, taxi drivers, and more recently, clubgoers, to display scrolling text on mobile screens. You might hold it up in the club and have a conversation across a loud room ....WANT ANYTHING FROM THE BAR.... ....G&T.... ....NO PROBLEM... I saw this happening, and thought it might be a good way to tell a story.


The text in this piece humorously engages with mental/social frameworks via an anecdote about the mysterious Henry.

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Photo documentation:

Video documentation:

When I was younger I was completely infatuated with someone.

She was brilliant. We used to hangout all the time.

It’s completely embarrassing to think about it now, but I was full of the most unbridled joy.

I was ecstatic.

I think initially I was a little scared to let her know exactly how I felt as I didn’t want to seem too intense.

We had studied together in London but had become close after graduating.

She worked at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in London, looking after the space every Monday, on the off-day while the gallery was closed.

We used to send each other SMS messages while she was at work. We’d message things like:

Hey! Wuu2 today? x 

 

Nothing much just hanging out with Henry!
(/__)

She’d always talk about a Henry, who’s Henry? I’d try and put it out of my mind, but she’d always bring him up, messaging things like:

Spent all day dragging Henry around. Lol.

OR

Works been non-stop. Just me and Henry here today. We’ve got the place to ourselves... wonder what we’ll get up to! ;) x

Who was this mysterious Henry?

She’d talk as if I knew him. I didn’t know a Henry.

I have a cousin called Henry, but she’d never met him.

I imagined a handsome man who was everything I wasn’t.

I imagined Thierry Henry. I imagined Henry Ford. But no, it obviously wasn’t any of them.

I felt like she and Henry had a connection that we’d never have. I felt devastated.

But I’d been wrong, completely delusionally wrong.

I found out Henry wasn’t a human at all,

Henry was a hoover, a 620-watt anthropomorphic vacuum cleaner to be exact.

In the UK Henry is everywhere.

He, the hoover that is, is a little red drum shaped vacuum cleaner with a face painted onto its side.

I’d completely missed the joke.

I had a moment of shattering epiphany while viewing her Instagram story - where she dragged a red hoover, with a familiar smiling face painted onto its plastic body around an empty Whitechapel Gallery.

At that moment I couldn’t help but laugh, I’d been so foolish. I’d been viewing the whole situation wrong.

She was just being funny!

In moments where the stories we tell ourselves fail to explain the world around us things become absurd,

and at that moment we can reinvent the way we see and understand the world

It feels like we’re actually going through a shattering moment right now,

there is a real absurdity between the way you see the world and the reality you’re physically experiencing.

It’s become increasingly apparent, over the past few years since we have all been carrying around little portals into cyberspace that allow us to see a mass of ‘content’,

YES - it’s curated by an algorithm,

BUT - it’s a complete mess,

juxtaposing the war in Ukraine with spiritual-stone-healing, or footage from inside Gaza with TikTok dances.

There is no coherent story.

BUT

What we can see through the chaos is war happening in real-time, and that completely undermines anything espoused on the television news or coming from the state.

This dissonance breaks down our collective conception of reality completely.

That too is shattering.

It seems that great shattering moments are not made by doing complicated things,

they are simple,

showing things that you know,

but that you haven’t noticed yet.

Something shattering I’ve become increasingly aware of has been happening in the UK since the financial crash in 2008,

when the money stopped,

people’s stable idea of reality stopped making sense.

The idea that; if you work hard you can progress through a system of social mobility and have enough money to buy a house and live a comfortable life

– this idea now seems absurd, and the story people have been telling themselves as an underlying framework so that they can function within society, has stopped making sense,

A political journalist wrote; “they [the politicians] know, that we know, that they don’t know what’s going on”

And with this, any idea of a possible future has dissipated,

no one talks about plans for a possible tomorrow, just repeating;

we’ve got to get through the next few years

– it’s been like this for 16 years now, it’s completely absurd.

It feels like we are waiting for something new to come along

A new story that acts as an underlying framework

YET - it’s become impossible to give yourself up to anything new,

I guess it’s hard to get your heart broken when you don’t give it to anyone. But if you don’t give it to anyone, it’s hard to see a future in anything.

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