Chris Howlett
Chris Howlett | Australia b.1974 | Metropolis: Part I-III (still) 2009 | Digital animation, HDVD file, single channel projection exhibited from hard drive, 16:9, colour, sound, 24.30mins, edition of 5 | Image courtesy: The artist | © Chris Howlett 2009
Chris Howlett’s recent work considers a contemporary culture increasingly seduced by apocalyptic reveries. In Metropolis: Part I–III 2009, he utilises the popular game SimCity Societies 2007 that offers users an opportunity to ‘build, play with and destroy amazing cities’ to create a series of machinima works — animated films made within real-time virtual 3D environments. Reshaping and recutting footage recorded in the game with sound effects and music hacked from the game’s engine, Howlett reworks the archetypes for authoritarian, capitalist and romantic societies. These different societies function as spaces for exploring homogenous psychological zones rather than visionary architectural solutions.
Metropolis: Part I–III reflects on the residential model of the gated community as a self-contained and self-sustaining community in which its subjects live, work and play in a structured but dysfunctional manner. For Howlett, each episode simultaneously functions as an allegory of everyday life in game space, and everyday life conceived of as an imperfect version of the game. Not surprising, the work takes place in a world where both viewers and avatars are unable to see the source of imminent danger. Like the last bastion of civilisation, achieving little but an increased state of entropy, the artist allows this world to break down of its own accord.
2010 artists | Philip Brophy | Nigel Helyer | Chris Howlett |Isobel Knowles & Van Sowerwine | Wade Marynowsky | Soda_Jerk | Lynette Wallworth
