Future Dance of Nostalgia
Future Dance of Nostalgia is a dancing game which invites audience to perform the choreography that extracts and abstracts the movements found in the pre-industrial, heavy physical labour, and work songs. Motion tracking technology allows the body movements to be quantified, measured, and evaluated. Historical archives of work songs provide the inspiration for the music that renders the old tales and melodies into clubbing beats that lead the dance.

Repeat
In the midst of the promises and fears surrounding robots and Artificial Intelligence, especially in the manual labour sector, Repeat attempts to imagine the illusory dance moves of the so-called augmented body tainted with the gender stereotypes of human ballet duets. Repeat shifts the performing body of the assembly line into the performing body onstage, unceasingly carrying out its tasks. The body meshed with the industrial exoskeleton tolerates and sustains strenuous tasks but ironically, it enables those actions to be repeated even more. Repeat uses passive industrial exoskeletons that are currently deployed in the workplace. This ain’t no fiction, this is the future promised to the human worker.

In ‘We Need Sanctuary’ (2016) and ‘Symptom Machine’ (2017), Cooper offers the body up as a contested space for communication and representation. Using computer-generated imagery, situations and characters are brought together to think through politics of exploitative labour, and the somatic experience of image production and distribution. Both works present, scenes of a Computer-generated bodies; both female and non-human who loom at the very edges of the screen. Their hands touch; they move backwards on a conveyor belt; and blood drips from the girl’s mouth while the non-human sweeps the floor behind her.

TETRAGRAMMATON
A dialogue between these two artists on themes of myth, ritual and meaning, as much about their exhaustion and propensity to bewilderment as any potential they may inhere, for recuperation for and by language, culture and society. Joey’s work, ‘Religiously observant’, is inspired by alchemical and occult ideas, the world of spirits and hallucinations. The wall print features a gold CGI blazon of the Tetragrammaton It references the Sumerian mythology of the Annunaki a race of ancient chthonic fertility Gods, subsequently inscribed in a series of publications by Zecharia Sitchin (a kind of elder statesman of conspiracy theorists worldwide) as descendants of aliens, who enslaved the human race to extract gold from the earth. John’s work similarly ranges over territories of opposition: between ancient and contemporary; mythic and kitsch; between the viscid and primordial. It takes as its subject the vector of congealment, in the Marxist sense of the way labour power is congealed in commodities and so forth, extending this metaphor into an aesthetics of myth and ritual, emptied out, flattened, compacted like a sedimentary layer of anthropocene garbage, for the post-historical epoch.The sound component provides an aural complement to this structure of refuse, exhaustion and abjection. Mixing pre- or post-linguistic utterances, grunts, groans, screaming: a kind of secular glossolalia chaotically interwoven with whalesong, deep techno and political oratory.