The City is new. Pulsing with vital energies, it is constantly becoming. Façades are layered on top of each other — half constructed edifices undermined even before their completion, making way for fresh structures which, in their turn, are built over, through and on top of. Nothing remains for long. All is continual, unending change.
The City is old. It grew out of desert sands millennia ago — it has always been new for a very long time. Decaying foundations crack and crumble, opening fissures within the great institutions which they support. In dark corners long neglected, strange lifeforms bloom. And across it all, the detritus of generations is heaped, to be pored over in the hope of finding some unrealised value.
At the City’s edge, which is everywhere and nowhere, its inhabitants try as best they can to survive in a world beyond their understanding.
Jay Treagus is a multidisciplinary artist and researcher.
Their work explores the contemporary dynamics of technology, belief and knowledge making. It spans both digital and physical worlds; artefacts, installation, performance, and site specific interventions; as well as academic and fictive (hyper)texts.
Running through these varied forms is a post-factual viewpoint, which regards mythology, conspiracy and esotericism as immersive technologies in their own right, and attempts to understand the ways in which they can be leveraged to do work in the world. This stance is, at its heart, concerned with developing practical tools for survival in a world which increasingly defies human projects of mastery.
- \\ Group Shows
- Realities: Arebyte Gallery residency, 2021
- \\ Residencies
- paraSpaces @ The Wrong Biennial, 2021
- Artist in residence @ The Lambent Institute, 2020-
- \\ Texts
- ‘Afrofuturism and Immortal Technology in Get Out and Us’ in The Undead in the 21st Century: A Companion. Peter Lang, awaiting publication
- Echoes from the Semiospheres
Exploring themes of communication, alienation, and collective being Echoes from the Semiospheres is an extra-audio musical composition and online installation which attempts to simultaneously immerse the viewer within, and exclude them from, its reality.
XOR (2016 - 2020)
Produced in collaboration with the Lambent Institute, the XOR series explores the Institute’s tracing and mapping of histories which have so far failed, for one reason or another, to become real.
Relics of a Future Dark (2021 - )
This project attempts to deconstruct those elements by which contemporary culture sees itself as ‘more advanced’ by reflexively focussing them through the lens of potential descendents, who might also see themselves in this same light. Or, put more simply, I ask, ‘what will our culture look like in the museums of the future?’
Instagram: @_adeadchannel
Email: info@adeadchannel.com