STRAYLIGHT CAVERN

About

The title of the piece, 'Straylight Cavern' is derived from cyberpunk author and sci-fi visionary William Gibsons' Villa Straylight in his novel 'neuromancer'. The Villa Straylight is a cyber-chateau of sorts, inhabited by cyber-deities where anything and everything is possible. Straylight Cavern offers the viewer a realm of possible otherworlds and dimensions, inspired by memories of Villa Straylight and it's inhabitants, but goes on to refer to other science fictional situations where mankind has colonised natural rock or ice formations in order to survive, such as the rebel bunker on the ice planet, Hoth, in Steven Spielberg's 'The Empire Strikes Back', or the androids cave in the film Michael Anderson's film 'Logans Run'. From the exterior, only a streamline, almost computer game generated graphic interpretation of glacial or rock formation is visible. The exterior of the installation is designed and fabricated by artist, Milika Muritu as part of the collaboration ethos of the curatorial intervention. Straylight Cavern is a continuum of artist/curator Richard Priestley's collaborative experiment in which he provides the construct of the scenario in which the artists he has selected are to be shown. This approach invites the participating artists to succumb to the effects of the ambiance, politic and genre of the structure upon their work within the intensity of the installation interior. This is part of an ongoing experiment which deals with anti-authorship and the recontextualisation of individual works. The structure borrows from set-design techniques, but handled by the imagination of Priestley's secondlife avatar, which is autobiographical of Priestley as an adolescent male, and is, therefore, self-indulgent to this extent. The genre and subject matter have been selected because of their potential as a vehicle for this collaborative experiment. The works selected from the artists invited to participate include video and animated pieces, which, in the context of the installation, offer portals into other worlds and dimensions being monitored from the caverns control centre. Three dimensional pieces are personified within the rock and ice structure of the caverns interior, and imply a kind of sample collection and display process on the part of the fictional inhabitants of the cavern.