Amos' World
The spacious gallery setting of Amos’ World is not unlike a warehouse in its structure. Its concrete interior is unlit aside from the glow of video projections and the occasional spotlight. Pressed against the center of the left wall of the gallery, a massive screen displays Cécile B. Evans’ Amos’ World: Episode 3. Viewers may sit on concrete blocks in order to view the video. The concrete blocks bear blue stains and/or paintings of simple geometries. Headphones rest on the blocks and can be used to listen to the video’s audio content. Two other projection screens show Evans’ Amos’ World: Episode 1 and Episode 2, respectively. Although, where the screen showing Episode 3 is more or less open to the viewer, the two other projection screens are sequestered to the space’s far ends and are blocked by concrete structures. The structures appear as the edifices of Brutalist buildings, complete with sets of stairs. One can pass around the “buildings” in order to access the projection screens. Alternatively, one can climb the stairs of the buildings and enter small, cube-like “viewing pods,” in which the viewer can privately watch the video in an enclosed space.
Amos’ World, as a video series, it tells the story of a Brutalist housing estate. Its architect, the titular Amos, is a puppet in the image of a middle-aged white male. Amos monologues at length about how he wishes to build the perfect individual-communal structure for his residents. Other characters, such as the Weather (voiced by Evans) and the Time Traveler, challenge Amos’ assumption that he can create the perfect system for all people. The apartment complex is constructed anyway, and those that come to live in the estate come to realize that the building is a failure. For example, a blue sparrow, the mother of one of the human tenants of the building, is killed by a design flaw of the housing estate. The solar panels in the building’s solarium fry the bird; clearly, the building’s construction does not take into account small flying creatures. The building does not only fail to accommodate its tenants physically, but also emotionally. The Secretary, for example, lives in a flat designed for a single-parent family despite the fact that her dependents have left her; her living space reminds her of her loneliness and almost compels her to express that loneliness in unhealthy ways. Throughout the series, the actors have to learn to work together to decide the fate of the building and create the community that they require. Some must also reconcile their physical change in form: many go from being human to digital actors. The Manager of the building, for instance, loses his human form and becomes an intangible creature able to affect the technology connected to the building.
Finally, the set pieces used in the filming of Amos’ World are scattered across the gallery in between the projection screens. For one, there is a wooden panel painted white; it is adorned with book-lined shelves and small screens displaying Amos’ face. It faces a mass of tangled blue wires in a tall glass case, atop which is a tiny workbench. To the panel’s side, a backlit blue wall stands erect. Pressed to the wall are 3 sets of 3D printed faces and hands colored a stark white. These, naturally, are the faces and different hands of the Amos puppet. One face is neutral, with its hands outstretched; one is grieving with its fists clenched; the last wears a smirk and its arms are akimbo. Further into the space, there is a waist-high cubic diorama of a forest of pine trees. It contrasts the piece pressed to the direct opposite (right) wall, a framed backdrop of a cityscape against a red dawn.
Photo Courtesy of Tramway, Glasgow
Amos’ World, as an exhibition, represents the culmination of three years of work on the titular video series. This menagerie of digital and physical artifacts was inspired by a single trope:
“The tragic white male…treated as though his foibles are worth it for what he is able, or what he just might be able, to produce, how he might change the world.”
Evans identified this trope in the history of Brutalist Architecture. Brutalist Architecture, at first, merely championed the use of bare building materials in the design of structures, an appreciation for the utility and quality of materials. Given that Brutalist structures were popular in urban areas (being cheap to construct,) Brutalist architects began to imagine ways in which their buildings could restructure and improve urban life. Brutalist architects, predominantly white males, set to engineering physical structures that would espouse different, “better” modes of urban life. Needless to say, these individual-communal structures were failures. The buildings were not only hard to maintain (the concrete would stain and crumble,) but the socialist utopian ideals behind the buildings’ designs were criticized for making assumptions about people’s needs and desires. Architects such as Le Corbusier and the Smithsons responded by blaming the tenants of their buildings for not recognizing and conforming to their vision. Evans’ character, Amos, is clearly modeled after these historical figures; his hubris incites the tension that drives Evans’ video series. Evans, in her portrayal of the Weather in the video series, asserts that a building constructed by a single person’s utopic ideals is doomed for failure.
Robin Hood Gardens, a famous Brutalist builing. Photo Courtesy of Wikipedia.
However, Amos’ World concerns itself with more than just the physical environment, seeing as Evans’ art concerns itself with “how digital technology impacts the human condition.” This is evident primarily in its use of digital actors. The digital actors of the video series interact with and relate to the human actors of Amos’ World with relative ease; for the sake of conversation, the perspectives and feelings of the digital actors are initially treated as equal to that of the human actors. Eventually, the digital actors find that the building cannot accommodate them. They find that the building is not suited for their physicality or does not promote their individual narratives. For example, in the video series, the Nargis, a trio of computer animated teenage flowers, find that their narrative is subsumed by the Secretary, a human character. The Nargis are extremely relevant to the story of the living estate; they are active participants in deciding the fate of the building. Yet, the fact that their single-family living situation forces them into a dependence on the Secretary, a more passive character, makes the Secretary feel she is given license to take some credit for their bold action.
Not only does the video feature digital actors, but installation gives the viewer the feeling of being in a digital space:
“Evans pays close attention to how people experience her work, and Amos’ World creates a fittingly enveloping environment in which to play out this tale of individual hubris brought to heel by collective resistance, of lost souls finding networked ways to turn solitary grievances into communal action…The cocooning effect of the space itself, combined with the use of headphones, creates an intimacy that resembles individualized, screen-based experiences of the internet.”
Through Evans’ use of digital actors and the arrangement of her work, Evans draws a parallel between her fictional housing complex to our digital landscape. Digital networks, like Brutalist buildings, give structure to human interaction and livelihood. Digital networks promote only some narratives (e.g. Facebook promotes narratives of perfect, happy lives) and accommodate only some clients. Similarly, networks have traditionally been conceptualized by people like Amos: the archetypal white male visionaries. Evans’ message about architecture and the ego is then extended to digital networks: the virtual world cannot hope to all befit all digital actors if only the few get to determine its structure.
Amos’ World is, at last, hopeful. Just as the characters of Evans’ video series are compelled to unite their individual grievances into collective action at the end of Amos’ World: Episode 3, the openness of the space and the benches in front of the projection screen showing Episode 3 invite viewers to share in an experience together. Furthermore, it is shown that aspects of imperfect networks, represented by the set pieces in the gallery, do not have to be wholly dismantled in order for collaboration to thrive. The set pieces can remain in the gallery so that viewers may learn from the sort of place Amos’ housing estate was and can reuse parts of the failed network to begin anew amongst others. Overall, then, Evans uses the gallery setting to help her viewers to create the sort of a system that she envisions through Amos’ World, a more ideal physical and virtual landscape. As she states in her role as the Weather:
“The ideal vessel is the one that is just beyond everyone’s control or even perceptibility. It’s one that everyone knows enough about to navigate within it, but not enough to spoil the possibilities of its form. The ideal form could be reality itself, all the materials – perceivable or not – and perspectives able to fit within it. This might be why fiction is so successful, it’s a tiny reality within a reality itself. It provides evidence of the possibility to work new shapes into existing vessels.”
In this way, Amos’ World is far more optimistic than Evans’ previous work, Hyperlinks or It Didn’t Happen (2014). Hyperlinks or It Didn’t Happen is primarily a video piece that imagines a world where digital actors collaborate to try and piece together an understanding of what it means to be human. By the end of the film, the digital actors “die” out of an inability to relate to humans and thereby stay relevant. Where the characters of Amos’ World are able to combine their efforts to improve their situation, the characters of Hyperlinks cannot collaborate in a way that saves them. The characters of Hyperlinks are flawed, and the characters’ teamwork does not provide an answer to their predicament. Furthermore, the gallery setting of Hyperlinks does not act as a solution its video’s conflict, as in Amos’ World. Similar to Amos’ World, the video content of Hyperlinks is displayed in an enveloping gallery setting filled with many elements of varying materiality. The different pieces of Hyperlinks are nigh impossible to connect logically (i.e. mentally hyperlink) without the use of a provided glossary of the exhibit. Evans shows the viewer that they, like the digital actors, cannot accurately piece together information for which they lack full context. In Hyperlinks, interaction between human and digital actors would be worthless in the attempt of both parties to remain connected, informed, and thus, relevant; there is just too much data in existence for both groups to parse. In Amos’ World, rather, all parties can point to their lived experiences as testimony for what must change and can go to affect the change they would like to see from there. In Hyperlinks, all of the actors lack the lived experiences to fully recognize where their salvation lies.
Hyperlinks or It Didn’t Happen, Photo Courtesy of the Artist’s Website: cecilebevans.com
Hito Steyerl’s Power Plants, on the other hand, is an installation work that more closely aligns with Amos’ World. Power Plants, like Amos’ World, is characterized by the use of video footage on large screens. The video footage highlights the experiences of people living in Hyde Park, London: the most socioeconomically inequitable borough in the city. The compilation of clips are interviews that demonstrate what it is like, for example, to be a disabled person or a factory worker within this setting. An augmented reality app, Power Plants OS, can be downloaded as a part of the exhibition and drapes facts about the socioeconomic reality of Hyde Park onto the gallery in which Power Plants is being shown. As in Amos’ World, Power Plants puts on full display the grievances of a people contained in a setting that does not fulfill their needs or wants. Power Plants, like Amos’ World, offers its viewer a solution to the imbalance of power via interaction with digital actors. Throughout the gallery, digitally animated flowers are in full bloom; their growth is guided by artificial intelligences that predict the growth of plants in Hyde Park. As the human viewer evaluates the AI’s guesses at what an ecological future might look like in the wake of Hyde Park’s socioeconomic disaster, the viewer’s mind is opened to what might develop socio-politically in the setting, how society might improve so that more flowers can grow. Evans and Steyerl, then, both suggest that collaboration among human and digital actors can help people to positively shape their social environments.
Power Plants, Photo Courtesy of the Evening Standard
All of this is not to say that Evans is wholly successful in communicating herself through Amos’ World. Evans’ gallery space, like the fictional housing estate of Amos’ World, does not accommodate its viewer physically. Viewers must sit on hard blocks of concrete, bare floors, and/or sit in claustrophobic viewing pods in order to witness the full video series of Amos’ World. Under such conditions, the viewer might be unwilling to attend the full series of Amos’ World, thereby lacking the context to make any sense of the exhibition. To that point, given that each episode of Amos’ World spans around 25 minutes, a viewer would have to spend at least an hour and a half in the gallery space to understand Evans’ aims in the space. That may be perceived as unreasonable length of time to one visiting a gallery. Amos’ World, then, might communicate itself better, say, as a part of a film festival, when people are more willing to devote their focus to a video work for an extended length of time. It could be said, however, that Evans is testing her viewer through the harsh conditions of the installation. Amos’ World can be seen as a proving grounds for the viewer; one only gets to understand Evans’ ideas for improving networks after struggling through an imperfect, unaccommodating system for themselves. After all, as the video series Amos’ World will show, people become motivated to change the networks in which they exist after enduring some sort of suffering within it. In order to see their changes through, they must devote time and effort to the reconstruction of their social environment. If a viewer cannot sit through three 25-minute videos, how can they expect to have the discipline to bring about social change?
Sources:
“CECILE B.EVANS – NARRATIVES OF A NEAR FUTURE.” International Symposium. HEAD Genève, August 21, 2018. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OmAP5Pcwh5Q .
Evans, Cécile B. “Cécile B. Evans: Selected Works.” IMAGES : HELLO. Cécile B. Evans. Accessed March 17, 2020. http://cecilebevans.com/index.php/activities/in-progress/ .
Fite-Wassilak, Chris. “Interview: Amos, Cécile B Evans & Co.” Chris Fite-Wassilak, April 16, 2018. https://cfitewassilak.wordpress.com/2018/04/16/interview-amos-cecile-b-evans-co/ .
Frankel, Eddy. “Cécile B Evans: Hyperlinks.” Time Out London. Time Out. Accessed March 17, 2020. https://www.timeout.com/london/art/cecile-b-evans-hyperlinks .
“Hito Steyerl on Power Plants, AI and Music.” The Vinyl Factory, May 3, 2019. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1v08U5-BKnE .
“Hito Steyerl: Power Plants.” Serpentine Galleries, April 30, 2019. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WY5gnHV5dBE .
Sharratt, Chris. “Cécile B. Evans's ‘Amos' World.’” Reviews. Art Agenda, February 8, 2019. https://www.art-agenda.com/features/257057/ccile-b-evans-s-amos-world .
Torkar, Felix. “Save Our Brutalism.” Jacobin. Accessed March 17, 2020. https://www.jacobinmag.com/2018/10/brutalism-architecture-public-housing-urban-planning .
