Dumb Type's 2022: remix

ICC, Tokyo

published in The Wire No.473, London, 2023

Excerpt

(...)

Dumb Type has always floated definitions of a medium (on stage, in the round, on-screen, in surround-sound) through combinatory logistics of hybrid staging. Tonight’s ‘film’ is a 4k projection on a large screen, in front of which is stationed a massive, ultra-HD LED screen. Picture a widescreen rectangle of white framing an ominous, obsidian square: the former captures light projected onto it; the latter beams light into the audience. The imagery is a bounty of time-lapse footage of quotidian ‘non-spaces’ from around the world. Life is presented as passages, phases, periods. The footage (all black and white, mostly produced by Shiro Takatani) is presented in a polytych grid of four squares. Occasionally it is time-sliced vertically (to create ghostly transformations of liquefied figures in a landscape), or horizontally (to generate stretched swathes of lines akin to a Bridget Riley painting). Atop this, stark laser-outlined quotes from Montieth’s text scroll left-to-right. The result is an ‘over-writing’ that critically reframes the unassuming, innocent imagery. The dual-screen interpolation highlights multiple resolutions, manifold textures, and pastoral florescence. Captured footage meets captioned forensics, implicating all documented spaces to be bound by globalist acceleration..

(...)

Text © Philip Brophy. Image © Dumb Type.