Programme_Wendy McMurdo & Paul Holmes
08|09 Alt-w Production Award - The Skater
www.wendymcmurdo.com
17th January to 1st March 2009
Ffotogallery, Plymouth Road, Penarth, CF64 3DM
Exploring the impact of virtual technology on the lives of the young and examining the relationship and contrasts between traditional and digital play. Wendy McMurdo's photographic work, and her Alt-w funded collaboration with filmmaker Paul Holmes, study interactivity through the theme of the avatar skater, an image of strange beauty and perfection. Like the avatars they represent – several of the skaters photographed were used as models for actual game avatars – their floating figures appear as beings able to be conjured, and manipulated, at will.
They are joined by a series of portraits of young gamers at play immersed in a highly mediated world. These poised figures allude to how personal identity is formed in a virtual environment – where fantasy slides into reality and back again, within the looped world of the game.
According to Sherry Turkle, Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, “Children grow up in a culture of video games, action films, fantasy epics, and computer programs that all rely on that familiar scenario of almost losing but then regaining total mastery: There is danger. It is mastered. A still-more-powerful monster appears. It is subdued. Scary. Safe."
This new body of work explores this disturbing dichotomy, examining the relationship and polarities – between traditional and digital recreation – and our need to play and explore both the scary and the safe.
Commissioned by Ffotogallery Wales and supported by Alt-w and New Media Scotland.
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