Paul Lemmon and Graeme Macdonald
Paul Lemmon, Infinite Presence, Painting, 2019. Courtesy: Paul Lemmon.
Following a call for applications from researchers at the University of Warwick, Professor Graeme Macdonald, was selected to collaborate with Coventry-based artist Paul Lemmon.
Paul highlights that digital video is everywhere. Thanks to the miracle of data compression it can be streamed to our screens in an instant (give or take a bit of buffering).
Though considered a solid transmitter of truth since its earliest days, and utilised as such in news footage, journalism, video interviews, closed-circuit TV and the like, the medium of moving image has now acquired a whole new fragility in its digital form. The coding and compression algorithms needed to transfer video files to our screens have given rise to powerful potential for distortion, fragmentation and manipulation. As with video tape, digital film is really only a set of instructions for a monitor describing how the illusion of an image should be displayed. But, unlike its VHS predecessor, the coding can be directly accessed and rearranged systematically or randomly. The visual results of this breaking of the code can be striking, but, as we have already seen with the development of ‘deep fakes’, so too could the ideological.
Paul’s paintings exploit the possibilities of this video disruption by applying it to all manner of film footage found online, from films to TV, to news to influencer clips, in order to explore the shape-shifting qualities of the digital world, foregrounding its illusory qualities and their effect on our idea of truth and what lies beyond the screen.
Graeme’s research and work are situated in the relatively nascent field of “petrocultures“, an interdisciplinary research field which produces academic and cultural/creative work assessing and registering the social and cultural expressions and lifeworlds of oil and fossil fuels at various sites across the world. Petrocultures is adjacent to the larger research concern known as ‘Energy Humanties’.
He is a founding member of the (ongoing) international After Oil collective which has for the last ten years produced collectively written (open access) books, podcasts and artworks that seek to initiate, imagine and think through the associated challenges of post-oil culture from a number of angles: aesthetic, political, infrastructural, affective, economic, etc.
Graeme is interested in science fiction and speculative cultures and more specifically the various visions this rich field has presented towards energy, environmental and futurological thinking in the broader sense. Graeme is also part of a team based in English and Comparative Literary Studies launching a new Environmental Humanities MA.
Together Paul and Graeme will collaborate to produce a significant new project for Coventry Biennial 2023. Graeme has commented:
“I am thrilled to be able to engage in this kind of collaboration with a ‘real life’ artist. The process has already been instructive for me, testing the significance and capacity of the speculative mode that my research often turns upon. ‘Open Futuring’ has become an influential set of techniques in an Environmental Humanities oriented towards the world to come. I’m curious about the ways in which Paul’s work, in form and approach, provides a novel means to think about transition and to get publics to engage with it in ways different to the speculative projections in scientific reports or environmental papers. The challenge that the climate crisis and the energy transition lays before us all—whether physicist or engineer, teacher or artist– is to think harder about how our way of apprehending its nature and possible outcomes might shape our practice—and how that practice in turn might offer something to shape those outcomes for the better. I’m excited to see what future this collaboration affords!”
You can learn more about Paul’s work in the short film below:
This project is generously funded and co-commissioned by University of Warwick with support from Warwick Institute of Engagement and the Sustainable Cities GRP.
