Cécile B. Evans
2021Hyperlinks or It Didn't Happen
Cécile B. Evans
HYPERLINKS OR IT DIDN'T HAPPEN is narrated by the failed CGI rendering of a recently deceased actor, PHIL, and follows a group of digital beings—render ghosts, spam bots, holograms—as they search for meaning. Multiple storylines and materials collapse and converge to raise questions about what it means to be materially conscious today and the rights of the personal data we release.
Hyperlinks or It Didn't Happen
What The Heart Wants
Cécile B. Evans
Unraveling the value of emotion in contemporary society, the work of Belgian-American artist Cécile B. Evans explores the person-to-machine exchanges that have come to define the contemporary human condition. Her video installation What the Heart Wants examines what constitutes a person in the digital age and how machines (technical, social, and political) shape how we are “human.” If “corporations are people too,” as in the notion of corporate personhood, then HYPER, an ambiguous power and the narrator of the video, has achieved this ultimate goal. Amidst the dizzying paradoxes of future-turned-now, she is joined by a range of other protagonists: an immortal cell, a memory from 1972 that has outlived the humans who would have remembered it, a disbanded trio of off-grid lovers, lab children with their robot caregiver, and a workers’ collective comprised entirely of disembodied ears.
What The Heart Wants
A Screen Test for an Adaptation of Giselle
Cécile B. Evans
This experimental screen test for an adaptation of the industrial-era ballet Giselle has been reimagined as an ecofeminist thriller. Weaving together digital footage, 16mm, VHS recordings, animation and deep AI, the screen test is a proposal for a hybridised world in a near future where multiple realities push to the surface.
A Screen Test for an Adaptation of Giselle
Amos' World
Cécile B. Evans
In the world of self-regarding architect Amos, there’s really only one thing that matters—Amos. There he is, sensibly chic in a black roll-neck sweater and neat gray trousers: “I want to build something important. I want to change the world. I want to express myself.” Amos is Cécile B. Evans’s amalgam of the twentieth-century starchitects who shaped the post-war built environment. Conceived as a mock TV series set in a Brutalist housing estate, her exhibition at Glasgow’s Tramway comprises three separate videos (or “episodes”). Made between 2017 and 2018 and collectively titled “Amos’ World,” each is screened concurrently in accompanying installations with soundtracks played on headphones. Dotted around the space are props and sets used on screen: scale-model shelves of colored binders, a miniature forest. As “Amos’ World” suggests, the egoistic visionaries Amos parodies were not ultimately in control of their designs. Evans emphasizes this point by rendering Amos as a jerky puppet.
Amos' World
