Alan Butler: Assets
Green on Red Gallery, Dublin
★★★★★
Alan Butler doesn’t just create artworks; he creates imaginaries: systems of representation and causation that are unique to his artistic cosmology.
Preoccupied by digital phenomena, predatory capitalism and environmental disaster, Butler’s work imaginatively renders tangible the virtual realities that underlie advanced 21st-century economies. His method exposes a vast and complex web of information relating to both ecological and economic systems, making clear the links between the two.
Assets, at the Green on Red Gallery, is perhaps his most ambitious exhibition so far. As you immerse yourself in it, you suspect, given the engineering and computer-programming skills on show, that Butler could easily have pursued a lucrative career in tech. The sheer mechanical complexity of his devices, not to mention their relationship to niche online databases, marks Butler out as a contender for the title of Ireland’s most technologically proficient artist.
Four artworks in the centre of the room set the pace of the exhibition. Take Pneuma: this modular work emits a frequency every time a million-dollar transaction occurs on the Bitcoin market. This frequency vibrates a horizontal plate, which produces a pattern in sand resting on top. A sensor then registers the fluctuating design and reproduces it as a hologram on a turning rotor blade.
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In another of the works, Thanatophone, a cluster of small directional speakers twist and pivot, delivering a beam of sound wherever they point. Each turn corresponds to a location on the planet experiencing a heat spike. A spectroscope linked to online databases simultaneously generates images of endangered flora from the affected region.
The impact of these works is immense. Their manifestation of forces that would otherwise be invisible is like a form of contemporary alchemy. The audience is witness in real time to two of the most significant factors affecting civilisation: the flow of wealth and instantaneousness of currency exchange in the digital era, and the slow-boiling inevitability of climate crises.
Butler’s exhibition also features works that explore the architecture of gaming and simulation software. Among my favourite is a series of large 3D-printed works, reminiscent of lithic or geological extrusions, derived from so-called Tessendorf waves, or complex computer-generated simulations of constantly changing ocean surfaces.
Beneath the explicit thematic content of each artwork, Butler addresses what he sees as an increasingly corporatised version of the internet, characterised by the rise of glossy advertising platforms like those of the social-media giants. This has eclipsed a more anarchic vision of the internet that Butler seeks to redirect our attention to, this one characterised by free, open-source and internationally co-operative data sharing.
Only an internet of this kind, the show suggests, can save us from forces seemingly hell-bent on our destruction.
Assets is at Green on Red Gallery, Dublin 1, until Friday, December 12th
