WASD -
move forward / backward
arrow keys -
look around
RF - hover / sink
Entropy Gauntlet
Zody Burke, Taylor "Tex" Tehan, Joonas Timmi, Lauri Raus
Production Engineer: Dan Edelstein
“There is nothing more mysterious than a TV set left on in an empty room … Suddenly the TV reveals itself for what it really is: a video of another world, ultimately addressed to no one at all, delivering its images indifferently, indifferent to its own messages. You can easily imagine it still functioning after humanity has disappeared.” – Jean Baudrillard, America
Entropy Gauntlet is an exhibition with an architectural premise—an invitation past the threshold of EKA Gallery and into a novel site. A transmutation of space, Entropy Gauntlet invites viewers to embark on a controlled choreography of passage. Inspired by wide-eyed summer night visits to amusement parks, laden with the nostalgia of childhood & playing with the expectations generated by the psychogeography of such spaces, the exhibition invites viewers to contemplate the tension between fantasies of the world we’ve inherited versus the reality of a warming planet.
Solastalgia, a concept which describes a form of emotional or existential distress caused by environmental change, presents itself materially in the exhibition through an amalgam of artist-made artifacts, set inside a narrative. Within the Entropy Gauntlet is a contemporary apologue; using architecture as archetype, exploring the porousness of post-western notions of national identity and its haunted histories. Here, utopia and dystopia become uneven categories in the realm of the anthropocene.
The primary crux of the exhibition begins with the illusion of having entered a dysfunctional haunted house ride. The first work encountered is an electric buggy that appears to be out of service, set on a track that winds through the space. Gallery patrons will be confronted with a challenge; to continue wandering through an environment which ordinarily would be off-limits, and which presents an implication of inevitable eerie encounters. This unique architectural and psychogeographic cartography, punctuated by artworks of various forms and levels of interactivity, creates an open-world narrative in which around each corner there exists something one might not expect. The artworks are housed in artist-built rooms, occupying the transitions between the discrete spaces. The culminating work will be a large-scale immersive video piece accompanied by an original musical soundtrack.
In the tradition of transformative environmental-architectural works such as Gregor Schneider’s “Totes Haus u r” and “Black Acid Co-op/Hello Meth Lab in the Sun”, the Entropy Gauntlet manifests as a linear series of archaeological sites undergoing perpetual excavation. It is a narrative of motion and placelessness tropifying the notion that invisible, emotional environs can be injected into the visible sphere to create a sense of longing, dread, and even abject horror.
- Zody Burke
A note from the artists…
The roadside motel is a ubiquitous feature upon the sprawling face of the continental USA, but it is entirely absent in Estonia. It is taken for granted as a place where small tragedies may or may not occur. It is a location for repressed emotions to manifest due to its invisible status, despite its ubiquity in the flyover states. We aim to engage with the surreality that permeates the line where memory and history interact, by attempting to replicate elements of one of these spaces in an unexpected location in Tallinn; providing for the audience a simulacrum of a space that exists between destinations.
The fact that the USA exists partially as a fantasy informed by media is also intrinsic to our concept. Two out of four of us are American; despite this, the two of us have experienced our home country in ways that run contradictory to the America that exists in the imagination of the cultural status quo. The other two of us are Estonian and have spent a considerable amount of time formulating fantasies about America & weighing these fantasies against facts. To honestly engage with the USA is to deal with omnipresent shadows that resist truth & dominate the country’s emotional cartography, and with an endless deluge of popular fantasies that provide alternative images to the USA that exists. For this reason, we claim, as a group, to be able to approach our concept impartially & equilaterally, despite our varied countries of origin.
The poetic transmutations of culture that occur when countries on opposite sides of the globe mirror and refract one another are also acutely fertile terrain for our work.
