Z = |Z/Z•Z-1 mod 2|-1: Lavender Town Syndrome

2020 - Film & Video (Film & Video)

13:43 minutes

Andrew Norman Wilson

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Z = |Z/Z•Z-1 mod 2|-1: Lavender Town Syndrome by Andrew Norman Wilson is a multi-channel video that uses three different imaging technologies—a photographic lens, photorealistic ray tracing animations, and fractal ray-marching animations—to travel through three constructed environments. The work’s subtitle, Lavender Town Syndrome, is named for a conspiracy theory in which more than 200 Japanese children were driven to suicide by a particular board in the game Pokémon Red and Green for Game Boy. Many others suffered serious migraines or nosebleeds, or turned violent when their parents tried to take the game away. Some cried until they started vomiting. These incidents were later determined to have been caused by the unsettling background music in Lavender Town, which, aside from containing a high tone undetectable to adult ears, was also an early experiment in binaural beats which are said to affect human behavior by syncing with listeners’ brainwaves. Z = |Z/Z•Z-1 mod 2|-1: Lavender Town Syndrome is one of three works that form the backstory of an ongoing project: a metafictional documentary about a group of artists who eventually drop out of the contemporary art world to pursue more socially productive design projects. In making these works, Wilson is interested in the role that technology plays in amplifying the impact of “truthiness” over truth. As sound, images, objects, computation, and bodies interrelate, they offer possibilities for intermedial imprints that provoke surprising new effects and complicated meanings.

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Andrew Norman Wilson is an artist, curator, and filmmaker whose practice is mostly based in research and documentary. His works—ranging from videos, sculptures, drawings, and performance lectures, to photography and mixed-media—investigate and critique the aesthetics and inequalities of the corporate world and the myths of technology. He often explores the effects of globalization in the realms of labor, capital, and information, highlighting cases that involve misconduct. The aesthetics of his work often knowingly employ the same digital mechanisms produced by the corporate systems he critiques. Gaining access to and exposing the internal systems of corporations is a key element for the artist’s earlier work. His most well known work that investigates these themes is Workers Leaving the Googleplex (2011). In his most recent works, Wilson has taken an interest in nonhuman entities, including mosquitos, dinosaurs, puppets, and oil pumps—using them as stand-ins for humans to explore human morality from a more “objective” perspective. They are often presented in endless loops to break the linearity of a traditional model of time, in which past, present, and future follow each other in a consecutive fashion.

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Colors:

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• technology.n.01
• truth.n.01
• fiction.n.01
• conspiracy.n.01
• body.n.01