Adam Costenoble

Blacktown Arts Centre
Synthetic Spaces | 15 June – 4 August 2007

the weather’s always fine / a cell in the social body is a two channel video work inspired by the novel A Brave New World by Aldous Huxley (1932). In the book, the character Bernard Marx is a frustrated and unpopular existentialist who, after a lifetime of discrimination, begins to question the values of the heavily regulated yet stable society in which he lives. Costenoble references a meditative moment in the book where Marx fleetingly realises his individuality, before quickly being drawn out of this mindset by the currency of his dystopian reality – frivolous nicety and distraction.

The installation presents two opposing images – one of an encumbered helicopter hovering in a tunnel and a second of a flock of dutiful pigeons feeding. The viewer’s movement between the two screens triggers a sequence where the helicopter loses control and crashes, and simultaneously the pigeons fly away. In this work, physical motion leads to the disruption of equilibrium and the demise of peace, whereby stasis perpetuates stability and uniformity at the expense of progress and change.