Patron
Drawing on the precision and efficiencies of the electrical pulse, Peter Trevelyan presents Patron, a complex invocation born of simple illusions, seemingly benign code switching and signal traces, but symptomatic of much more. Patron offers up an illusionary space capable of folding light and perspective and of replicating endlessly whatever content is made available within its cavernous, mirror-lined interior.
Contemporary realities are increasingly subsumed within fresh networks of regulation and control evolving from the decay of society’s rigid, disciplinary structures, and the residual effects of such uncertain transitions are not lost on Trevelyan. From under the sway of controlling panoptic institutions emerge new monstrous free-floating mechanisms of dominance that are often separated from traditional structures of governance and instead align with instantaneous disruptive flows of information and capital.
Born of a production line that has seen Trevelyan realise similarly dystopian devices, Patron shares with such predecessors as the masterful Panoptahedron (2005) and the crystalline Tetragrammartron (2006) an obscurity that proves wondrous, seductive and dubious all at once. Supporting the bleak and unwavering authority of Panoptahedron’s imposing structure and scale, a dark nettle of electrical coils and motion sensors feasted off impulses drawn from any perceptible movement within the surrounding darkness of the gallery. A hotbed of electrical lights flickered systematically, tracking changes within the immediate environment and spiralling that information off into the infinite within its reflective core.
Like Patron, Panoptahedron indulged our frustrations as much as our investments in its systematic logic and sensory pleasures, aptly echoing Samuel Butler’s proposition in Erewhon’s chapter 24, ‘The Book of Machines – continued’: ‘they serve that they may rule’. The more you waved your arms, moved around or tried to catch a glimpse of yourself in Panoptahedron’s internal mirrors, the more foolish the work’s manifold reflections made you look. Similarly, with Patron Trevelyan brings ever-advancing surveillance technology into play through the use of closed circuit cameras and networked television screens, letting us continue to search hopefully for some small reflection of our importance or role within the system, this time on the screens below.
Patron draws us into a closer consideration of structural logics on a variety of scales, allowing us to consider actions and appearances more methodically. Keeping a close watch, Patron proffers its viewers the opportunistic vantage of a disembodied perspective. With its technologically enabled conjuring tricks and visual chicanery, Patron’s denial of an interface with our own reflection presents its users with an oddly frustrated experience of narcissistic investment. While we might expect to see ourselves reflected meaningfully within the sea of screens, we actually find that our cursory presence is nothing but an incremental surface detail within the cortex of Patron’s interminable evasions and endless retreat.
Patron’s systematic totality may seem to affirm the eternal and unquestioned advance of progress, but Trevelyan cleverly persuades us to consider more sceptically the dangerous potentiality of the information age and the value of any social grouping based on self-obsessed, greedy individuals haplessly ensnared and enthralled whatever the cost.
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