SPACE

2024

I was working with a broad sense of the problematics of language and trying to play with those issues as a form of spatial/temporal material. There are motifs in the work that have been appearing in my work a lot, such as Laika, (The Russian Space Dog) and references to The Russian Cosmists, but more specifically I think this piece concerns the mattering of language itself, and the mistakes, stutters, malapropisms and gaps which characterise it. As the piece began to take shape I came to think of it as an attempt to develop a form of faltering call (or cry) out to whoever (or whatever might) be ‘out there’. Much of the language and the imagery is developed in out of a collage and conversation with AI prompts but used in such a way as the language begins to break down and dissolve into something more dreamlike. It occurred to me that a form of dream language might be able to bypass the normative language of the every- day (and indeed of AI) to become something more like a spell or a summoning. If anything, and perhaps ironically, I think I was trying to utilise AI technology to make something that could never be made solely by AI, to make some form of poetry of disturbance.

AI Context

The work is constructed out of numerous prompts into AI which were developed out thoughts and propositons around the interconnectedness of language, space and time.

Steve Dutton

United Kindgom

Bio

I am an artist and occasional curator based in the South West of England where I hold a studio at Spike Island in Bristol. My multidisciplinary practice spans drawing, performance, sound, moving image, and text, with a particular focus on exploring the intersections of language, space, and time. My work is characterized by its fluid movement between various media and conceptual frameworks, engaging with the acts of reading, drawing, painting, speaking, and writing.