Contaminants & Compatibilities

Co-exhibitors:

Ian Gouldstone, Callum Brown, David Cotterrell

Contaminants and Compatibilities was the inaugural show at Crater, a new hemispherical screening located in the window of 1 Borthwick Street, Deptford, London. Over the course of two evenings, Crater offered the public an immersive experience, playing off the street's architectural dimensions.

For this first show, which took place on the 12-13th of December, three moving image works by Callum Green, David Cotterrell, and Ian Gouldstone explored the ways in which the mechanical gaze influenced perceptions of landscape, and thus our relationship with the environment. The UK Geospatial Commission was in the process of developing a coherent, nationwide, location data framework, and they suggested it would be ''the unifying connection between things, systems, people and the environment.'' In essence, they created a digital twin of our lived environment, designed to serve as a unilateral platform for future spatial practices in the UK. In this process, the land was carved up into a rational system of units and compartments to form a proxy landscape. The human and natural systems that don't meet a machine logic are externalised. 

Crater was commissioned by Empathy & Risk, an artist-led interdisciplinary initiative that addresses issues of systematic failure in contexts of contemporary global crisis.