An apparition or an interface or a proxy or a withdrawal or a ringer or something

A solo exhibition for Lungley Gallery. This work is a 5-channel video and animatronic installation in which a number of different forms of representation and mimicry are brought into conversation with ideas around animal consciousness and artificial intelligence. There is a sub-narrative around deforestation and climate catastrophe.

The work is structured around the first filmed episode of the 1980s TV series The Littlest Hobo, in which a dog called London was asked to play the character of a dog called Smoke (named in the aftermath of his fictional rescue of a family of wildcats from a dangerous forest-clearance fire). Smoke's situational awareness, bravery and ethics consistently outstrip those of the humans around him.

In the installation, a large owl face is crudely rendered using an image of a human hand on a dog's head to form a 'beak', and a pair of videos of rotating decoy hawk-head scarecrows as eyes. These eyes can be seen to mirror the movements of human characters in the TV drama, which plays on a screen held in the talons of a decoy owl (a different form of off-the-shelf scarecrow). This decoy owl appears to respond to the presence of visitors to the space, looking away from the 'eyes' and towards viewers if they approach. Every 20 minutes or so the opening/closing credits of the TV drama spill out across all of the screens and break the owl-face illusion.

The press release gave a loaded version of this description:

"A cheap decoy owl finds itself gifted or encumbered with bare minimal signs of consciousness or something, Arduino blinking in its hole. Inscrutable, perched on a crude metal branch jutting from a wall it shares with a bunch of screens, but distracted by the screens (an improbable owl-face of screens) and probably by you. It appears to have found a screen of its own, which it clutches in unsatisfactory claws, its two-bit sensors struggling to register why those dirty swivel-eye-scarecrow-owls on those owl-face-screens seem possessed by the spirits of the figures in its grip. Juddering from the depths of the internet a dog called London has been tricked into pretending to be a dog called Smoke or something, pretend rescuing pretend wildcats from pretend forest fires for humans to suckle, and soon it has proved itself more human than the humans pretending to be other humans all around it, and so on. Before long it has taken to the sky, its appalling chain of anthropozoomorphic re-fictions or something escalating from between claws and saturating the room."

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