Snow Crash

Harriet Birks

Exhibition Dates:

10 – 31 October, 2009

Launch:

Saturday, 10 October, 3:30-5 pm

Exhibition Location:

beta_space, Cyberworlds Gallery, L1 Powerhouse Museum, Sydney

Curator:

Julia Burns 

'Snow Crash' is a virtual landscape that recalls early flight simulators and low-fi computer graphics.

It is a finite world of reduced planes akin to sci-fi concepts of virtual worlds such as the 'meta-verse' in Neal Stephenson's 'Snow Crash' or the 'auto-verse' in Greg Egan's 'Permutation City'... a parallel universe to Google Earth, World of Warcraft and Second Life.

The audio track crackles with static interference suggesting possible radio transmissions from unseen origins. Pulsing black spheres float eerily in the sky.

Clusters of quartz grow from mysterious ruins, resembling the 'Crystal World' of J.G. Ballard.

In a simultaneous glance back at the past and to post-apocalyptic narratives of the future it provokes questions about our current direction and our changing technological landscape. 'Snow Crash' is a place of mysterious energy, a world that is self-organised from the chaos of white noise into a drifting static dream.

Harriet Birks is a Sydney based new media artist. She works with Audio Visual technologies and is a lecturer of animation at the College of Fine Arts, UNSW. 

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