“Citizens of Nowhere” is the first solo exhibition by Yuri Pattison in Austria – about explores contemporary relationships between truth and artifice conveyed through visual cultures, communication technologies, information circulation and the organisation of space. …. he exhibition set up borrows aesthetics both from marketing suite or showrooms and set dressings of curious urban environment that relates to Pattison’s exploration of global cities as sites of financial interactions between digital devices, bodies, architecture and objects …. “Citizens of Nowhere” presents new organisation and presentation of information – both visible and the invisible – through communication technologies and the urban space, testing out the making, manipulation and simulations of experiences that significantly shape complex and contradictory national or global identities. With distinctions between reality and simulation becoming increasingly porous through the use of intersecting visual, spatial and affective languages, Pattison likewise suggests the artificial to be distinctively meaningful.

Yuri Pattison (born 1986, Dublin) lives and works in London. Recent solo exhibitions include “sunset provision”, mother’s tankstation limited, Dublin (2016-17), “user, space”, Chisenhale Gallery, London (2016), “Architectures of Credibility”, Helga Maria Klosterfelde Edition, Berlin (2015) and “Free Traveller”, Cell Projects, London (2014). Group exhibitions include British Art Show 8, Leeds Art Gallery, touring UK venues (2015-17), “The Weight of Data”, Tate Britain, London and “Transparencies”, Bielefelder Kunstverein and Kunstverein Nürnberg (all 2015). Pattison is the recent recipient of the Frieze Artist Award 2016.

New media artist Yuri Pattison uses digital technology, video and sculpture to investigate the political and social ramifications of rapidly developing technology and the depth of visual culture in the Internet age. His works are both physical and digital, taking space both on and offline to explore the notions of open communication, and the flexibility of labor boundaries in the modern workspace. Often taking the form of multi-screen video installations or technology-based sculptures, Pattison’s work is at once relevant and thought provoking.

Frieze London this October, is the winner of the 2016 Frieze ….. “Yuri Pattison is one of today’s most important young artists looking in a critical way at new technologies,” said Frieze Projects curator Raphael Gygax in a statement. He hopes the award will allow “Pattinson to build upon his thought-provoking and increasingly relevant work, exploring cultures of ‘trending’ in the digital economy and the implications for human industry, creativity, and control.”

 At Frieze London 2016, Pattison installed a networked artwork entitled Insights (crisis trolly) throughout the fair, involving a series of ‘Big Board’-style monitors – often used by media companies to visualize sales statistics or popular news articles, enabling a live response to consumer behaviour. The screens collected information from the fair environment as well as the ‘Internet of Things’, speaking to visitors about the ever-expanding universe of data being produced and consumed daily – as well as the politics of data-driven systems, as prophesized in science fiction.

Born in Dublin, 1986, lives and works in London. Yuri Pattison is a tireless, natural thinker at the forefront of a group of emerging artists / intellectuals whose practices, in an inherently 21st century manner, are informed by a seamless merger of hard and soft realities. He works in sculpture and digital media, exploring the visual culture of digital economies and the natures of online/offline skill sharing. Typical, recent examples of his artworks thoughtfully list medium and/or displayed interior contents, as if listed by border security agents: “custom made perspex 1U format box, server PSU & switch, server case fans, AI: The Tumultuous History of the Search for Artificial Intelligence, by Daniel Crevier (book), PDLC switchable privacy film, cables, generic unpainted architectural 1:100 scale model figures, dust, sebum [an oily secretion of the sebaceous glands], digital timers, travel power adapter…”

Pattison is interested in ideas of transparency – from the open communication of data, to the transparent architectures of new models for shared live/work space, symptomatic of the increasingly flexible and permeable boundaries between life and work. The edition comprises a set of three individual photographs encased in an acrylic box and overlaid with a sheet of 3M™ Privacy Filter. When viewed from a specific angle, the photographs depict scans of sourced objects related to work and productivity, such as the sleep suppressant drug, Modafinil, an Acme Klein bottle and Mac computer parts. user story (power scan), 2016further explores Pattison’s ongoing interest in how contemporary start-up companies, particularly in the tech industry, often draw on the aesthetics of historical speculative environments and the values of progress and transparency are employed for enhanced productivity.

user story (power scan), 2016  – Acrylic box, 3M privacy film, C-Type photographic print, polyester and antistatic tapes, security screws
Size: 33 x 24.5 x 2.5 cm
Edition of 7

LABOR is pleased to announce the first exhibition of Yuri Pattison in Mexico, crisis cast. Pattison’s work explores the multiple relationships between visual cultures, space, communication technologies and the circulation of information. Pattison uses digital technology to investigate the political and social ramifications of the rapid development of technology and the depth of visual culture in the Internet age. His physical works take advantage of the space outside the web to explore the notions of open communication and the flexibility of labor borders in the modern workspace. The artist creates complex scenarios to construct narratives with fictitious scripts that lean towards the theory of conspiracy and the Science fiction. Pattison’s works seek to make visible the vectors of these decisions. In the work that lends its title to the exhibition, Pattison collaborated with a private security firm called CrisisCast to visualize both the visual dimensions of disaster preparedness and the underlying technical infrastructure. Pattison commissioned CrisisCast to produce the preparedness scenario featured in the public solitude video. The firm’s founders use their background as theatre-makers to devise plausible scenarios in which “crises” could emerge.

The work Pattison commissioned features the firm’s performers – some of whom are erstwhile security professionals – traversing a simulated airport. Shot from multiple perspectives, the video referencing the disjoint, ostensibly neutral gaze of CCTV cameras, Tower II integrates the viewers into the spectacle of pseudo-security, displaying a live feed of the gallery spliced into the video footage housed in a server rack. Tower II evokes the material architecture that lies beneath notions like the “the Cloud”.
The cameras installed in the gallery are articulated to pan, zoom, and tilt according to automated settings, creating unique “non-human” perspectives on the space. The gallery’s infrastructure is included in this process as well, integrating the cabling and lighting for the show within a Unistrut grid installed overhead. The gallery’s lighting structure will also be modified to create lights themselves constitute a work entitled always golden hour somewhere, an ongoing piece Pattison conceived which is designed to mimic the color and light patterns of solar cycle within a circuit of preprogrammed interruptions. Evolved from the lighting schemes used in locations like casinos – where a controlled environment and heavy surveillance are combined to produce a form of carceral entertainment – the work also seeks to reify the global, even galactic, discourses brought to bear on the appurtenances of our contemporary “surveillosphere”.

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