Nicholas Tayler
Kupe and the Whale
About the artist
My work is fuelled by meditating on what exists beyond what is visible and rational, to create speculative, mythical visions of the ways humans interact with the globally present systems and structures that have great influence on our ability to live, move and communicate. I use many types of digital and analogue media, encompassing video, animation, sculpture, performance and the web to fabricate the augmented universes in which my stories live. My practice has been influenced by my own personal situation as an individual with multiple nationalities (I moved to the UK as a child from New Zealand) and a fascination with identity, internationality, travel and the myths of these topics has emerged. My recent time working with video and animation within a school of architecture and earlier work with photography has allowed me to begin to develop a system of representation that I feel satisfies the core ideas of my work both structurally and visually.
About the work
'...people inhabiting all frequencies of the socioeconomic spectrum are intentionally reaching for some of the oldest navigational tools known to humankind: sacred ritual and metaphysical speculation, spiritual regimen and natural spell'. Erik Davis, Techgnosis: Myth, Magic and Mysticism in the Age of Information, (London: Serpent's Tale, 1999). As the cultural critic Erik Davis proposed, we are living in an intensely technologised world, made possible by the ability to 'know' about characteristics of our universe and its forces through science. But this doesn't quell our appetite to appreciate the unknown side of it. Rather the opposite, new technologies, especially those which transcend and break down borders between countries, cities, homes and offices, fuel our appetite for the mystical and magical and the need to speculate about the nature of our world. Exploring the connection between global systems and human mysticism, my submission, 'Kupe and the Whale' is the key component of a larger work entitled 'The Parallels Almanac', a made mythology that presents such a mystical, speculative interpretation of the world. A world populated by the spirits of omnipresent systems like money and airliners, where a Maori warrior makes a quest in reaction to the way these immense global architectures have changed his culture. Located online within a digital almanac, this film is the starting point of a network of film segments, audio, photographs, drawings and texts which aid the visualisation and re-telling of an oral history constructed by the artist. Each component is accessed on a graphic map containing the 'What' of the project, which is complemented by further material in the Why and How sections of this extensive project. The Parallels Almanac is located at www.parallelsalmanac.net.
