The inevitability of obsolescence Bird’s interactive Video Pool Drawing Room traces the transience of technology A closer look
By: Alison Gillmor Posted: 3:00 AM CDT Saturday, May. 18, 2024

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This article was published 18/05/2024 (853 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

WHAT IT IS: Drawing Room by Winnipeg artist Lawrence Bird is a multilayered multimedia installation currently on view at Video Pool. It’s part of a series of programs exploring Video Pool’s “mid-life crisis,” as the organization calls it, as the artist-run centre marks its 40th year.

WHAT IT’S ABOUT: Its name a nod to wheat co-ops, Video Pool was founded in 1983 to allow artists working in video to get together in the same spirit of Prairie co-operation, sharing equipment and expertise.

Bird’s work pays homage to that history, which one Video Pool artist has called, “The Matrix meets rural Manitoba.” The installation is loosely enclosed by rough, greying wood boards that resemble old outbuildings. Piled against them is a collection of worn-out, clunky AV and tech equipment — transistors, computer boards, TV monitors, lights, cords and cables, some of it covered with rust and dust.

Referencing the bulky analogue days of tape and camcorders, this is a poetic expression of obsolescence and a poignant reminder that even our slick, sleek tech gadgets will one day be outmoded.

Facing these piles of equipment are three angled screens, which take on layers of time, space, technology and meaning. Bird has started with a rotating series of video stills taken from four decades of work by Video Pool artists, including Ryan Takatsu, Gilles Hebert, Brenna George, Dominique Reye, James Dixon and Rhayne Vermette.

Bird, who also works as an architect and urbanist, has focused on images of buildings and city spaces, and there are blurred impressions of skyscrapers, suburban homes and Exchange District warehouses.

On top of these pictures, the cast shadows of branches call up the natural world. Technology is represented by a cutting-edge generative software program that reads the room — literally — and then extends points into moving, radiating lines for a trippy, interactive experience. (As I was standing there, I could see the program picking up on me, my striped shirt projected onto the screen in abstracted and vibrating white lines.)

As suggested by its title, Drawing Room is also interactive in the old-school way: Participants are encouraged to pick up pencils and draw, and the white screens are now covered in sketches of faces and figures and scrawled words and phrases.

Bird’s exhibition also includes a projection on a second-floor window visible from the Artspace lobby, featuring looped footage of an abstracted video-game figure endlessly running through images generated by Google Earth’s terrain model of Winnipeg. With a mesmerizing rhythm of repetition and variation, Bird imagines these digital images radiating out from the gallery into the real-world city that surrounds it.

WHY IT MATTERS: So much of our world is now experienced digitally, with nonstop streams of data conveying a mediated reality where lines between communication and misinformation can get very slippery. Just as Video Pool artists in the ’80s were responding to the landscape of commercial television and advertising, many media artists now make works that reference the digital terrain of our computers, phones and gaming consoles.

For Bird, video art is a way of helping people stop, look and become more aware of the medium and how it works, encouraging us to think critically about this unending barrage of digital images instead of just passively receiving it.

alison.gillmor@freepress.mb.ca