Michael Eby
MICHAEL EBY is a writer and researcher on contemporary art and digital culture. He currently lives in London.
Lawrence Lek: AIDOL 爱道
By Michael EbyManifesting his architectural training as well as an interest in the visual aesthetic of role-playing video games, Lek’s computerized fantasies elicit the spirit of free-roaming gameplay with the comprehensiveness of a technical illustration.
Constantina Zavitsanos: L&D Motel
By Michael EbyMuch of the work of Constantina Zavitsanos maps the bodily encumbrances of personal disability onto an axiological skepticism of contemporary forms of labor. In their work as well as their writing,1 disability and debt are treated as inextricable and interchangeable, and, for the artist, dependency—in the broadest, most abundantly connotative sense of the word—is emphasized as their artistic practice’s pedagogical and discursive content.
Haegue Yang: Tracing Movement
By Michael EbyOne difference between a diagram and a tracing is their relationship to abstraction. To diagram is to anticipate the production of something new, and a diagram’s information can be read selectively. To trace is to attempt to capture the totality of a formation as something absent.
Mandy El-Sayegh: Cite Your Sources
By Michael EbyThe works adhere to the same format: one large image serves as the work’s base, stretching across the entirety of the plane surface, while three or four additional figures are spread out on top.
Libita Clayton: Quantum Ghost
By Michael EbyThe Bristol-based Clayton's new show at the southeast London gallery Gasworks uses archival material to simulate this emigration from one international mining hub to another. Titled Quantum Ghost, the installation considers inorganic matter is the vital agent driving international flows of capital and the coerced movement of bodies.
Simon Sellars's Applied Ballardianism: Memoir from a Parallel Universe
By Michael EbyOur autocatalytic world renders the tropes of classical science-fiction obsolete. Romantic fabulation, deployed prior to the space race and the globalization of telecommunications, breaks down when confronted by a technoscientific paradigm no longer operating at the limit of an extrinsic unknown.
