source: evelynyard

Paul Kneale is a London based artist, (born Canada,1986). Kneale’s work typically explores language, material, and the networked mind. He produces paintings, videos, texts, sculptures and performances. These often address the location of their production.
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source: evelynyard

Evelyn Yard is pleased to present a solo show by Paul Kneale, ‘4 or 5 self portraits for free-form natural language descriptions of image regions’. This exhibition follows on from his October 2014 offsite project at Tank.tv, ‘SEO and Co.’ where the artist re-appropriated YouTube’s algorithmically generated text of a talk he participated in to form the basis for a screenplay that was filmed in his South London Studio. For ‘4 or 5 self portraits for free-form natural language descriptions of image regions’, Kneale has arranged an informal research partnership with Google in relation to in-development technology which can create automated text descriptions from image files that render as of yet impossible nuances of action and time. The artist will show a number of sculptures that activate light, time, and ontological transfer between medium states, posing an ultimate challenge to this technology when they are condensed into image documentation. The installation documentation will be given to Google for analysis, thus positioning the technological reading of the images in the traditional role of the art critic. The sculptures are once again drawn from the vague form-template of the artists life, and involve banal but highly contemporary activities such as using a scanner, reading a self-help magazine, watching a 3D film, taking an easyjet flight, and shopping at a £1 shop. Within these scenarios they explore materials which the artist has described in a recent essay as the ‘new abject’ — brand new, yet intuitively revolting materials, as well as disruptions in time and perception brought about by our mental inhabitation of new technologies.
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source: artuner

Paul Kneale’s art experiments with the digital image and the loss and retrieval of information which takes place online. The digital landscape is a key facet of his practice; Kneale explores the way in which it can be manifested and reimagined in the flesh of the physical object.

Recently, the artist has been manipulating scanners to function as a cameras. Rather than capturing an image, the scanner creates an impression of the ambient light within the artist’s studio, bearing the abstract visual trace of the space surrounding him.

Kneale lets the process manufacture the work; the scanner paintings are built up from unique impressions and displays multiple layers and striations between the transparent sheets, the colour and form harmonising according to the environmental light of the artist’s studio.

Kneale’s artworks are then imbued with a strong sense of depth and layering; he plays with the juxtapositions of the bulky physicality of the scanners and the immateriality of the fleeting impression they capture.

Paul Kneale is an artist that explores the possible physical manifestations of the virtual reality of algorithms and information flux which constitutes our domestic environment. Kneale is interested in how the world is constantly translated into a digital language which simplifies, trivialises and depersonalises content and the people it addresses.

In the project SEO & Co. at tank.tv (London, October 2014), the artist assembled a script automatically generated from YouTube keywords used for search engine optimization. Following this material, he created five filmed performances at his studio (the disused Rotherhithe Library in South London) that examine the degradation of language and meaning in the Web.

These experiments see Kneale’s partnership with Google in the development of a programme able to create automated text descriptions from image files. Hypothesising a future when computers will be able to replace art critics, the artist creates a brand new frontier of automatic writing: a creative process devoid of any rational human control.

The contrast between machines and their aerial product results in what Kneale defines as the “new abject”. In response to Julia Kristeva’s 1980 text Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, the artist identifies a “new abject” for the information technology.

Describing today’s inherent revulsion for brand new materials, he pinpoints a disorientation in the consciousness of time and location, caused by our immaterial inhabitation of new technologies.

This sentiment is embodied in works which often address, in original and innovative ways and media, the simultaneity and layering occurring in our ever-linked virtual existences.

Kneale, in an interview with i-D, defines the Internet as ‘a whole way of being in the world’. His practice aims at investigating the role of art in this new enigmatic dimension.

PAUL KNEALE

Born in Canada, 1986, he now lives and works in South London. He received his MFA from the Slade School of Fine Art, London, in 2011 and exhibited at Evelyn Yard, London, in 2015, and at tank.tv in London in 2014. He previously exhibited at Art Gallery of Ontario, Canada, Fondation Galeries Lafayette, Paris, And/Or, London, and Libraryplus, London.