Travel in all its permutations, from the eco backpacker to the leisure seeker, positions itself as an alternative lifestyle choice emblematic of our personal individuality. In thousands of identical photographs we become transitory consumers, performing an exploration of the self via Thai beaches and Himalayan hikes. Warped by a year of lockdown, a struggling travel industry has acted to amplify the longer for manufactured discovery, bombarding passive audiences with paid advertisements, pop-up ads and spam email.

As lockdown conditions lift and we are free to imagine our first post-Covid holidays, bots prepare to battle it out, vying for our reserves, both economic and emotional.

In Bag With A Logo (2020), a new digital performance piece produced specifically for The Terminal (2021), Jessica Evans and a series of default avatars run lines, reading a script produced via combination of various online chatbot generators. Through their forced delivery and glitched understanding of prices, deals, weights and capacities, Evans draws attention to the artificial nature of 21st century aspiration and wanderlust. No longer can we authentically claim to seek out cultural experiences, each venture into the unknown is instead the product of a mesh of emotional manipulation. A desire formed inside us through data analysis and personalised marketing.

Displayed throughout the course of The Terminal, Evans’s performance carries with it the constant reminder that even in the adventures where we declare our autonomy, we have become products of an all encompassing system.

Continuing narrative threads from her contribution to the exhibition, Evans is showing for the first time two new works, Liminal Act (2020) and Antibody Bag (2020). In Liminal Act, we encounter again one of Evans’s default avatars, however, in this instance the transitory scene is no longer the familiar polished interior of an airport, but instead a hollowed out and graffiti covered incomplete building. Loaded into uncomfortable surroundings the avatar acts erratically, performing stock motions that betray his unease. It is as if all facade has melted away leaving behind the Antibody Bag, a greenscreen mortuary bag, symbolic of the translation of human from being into product, wrapped in a fabric that permits the projection of identity.

Jessica Evans (b. 1995) is a predominantly digital performance artist, who received their BFA from The Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford. Using absurdist AI dialogues and internet subcultures, Evans’ practice explores the human condition within virtual spaces. Guided by hacktivism and pro-piracy ideologies, she aims to exploit the binaries of society via the malleability and misuse of computer coding. Exhibitions include the solo show: That Perfect Moment, Radcliffe Science Library, Oxford (2017); and group presentations: The Wrong Epicentre, Centre Del Carme, Valencia (2019); Ladies and Gentlemen, TESTT Space, Durham; and RUSKIN SHORTS, Modern Art Oxford, Oxford (2018).

The Terminal: Human Shaped Whole

directed by: Jason Isolini

featuring: Bob Bicknell-Knight, Ian Bruner, Joshua Citarella, Jessica Evans, James Irwin, Claire Jervert, Kakia Konstantinaki, Angeline Meitzler, Erin Mitchell and Neale Willis

curated by: Off Site Project

PARTICIPATING ARTISTS:  

Jessica Evans .