Environmental Exposure

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Environmental Exposure, isthisit?’s 27th online exhibition, featured two artists, Camilla Edstrom Odemark and Jack Ratcliffe. Both works consider the environmental issues that are currently affecting ‘our’ world, and the different ways people are discussing the aforementioned issues. In Odemark’s video work ‘This Happened to Us’, the viewer is continually presented with multiple layers of a screen, peering through pixelated forests and virtual domains to observe what’s happening ‘beyond the wall’. The visual metaphor of a snake eating itself, alongside consuming other snakes in its vicinity, is continuously used throughout the six-minute odyssey as a way of discussing the procrastination that occurs on the internet on a daily basis. The piece is partly covered by Ratcliffe’s ‘Digital Forest’, a continuously changing biome generated in real-time from the results of the Bing search engine. Similar to how Odemark’s film discusses procrastination on the internet, this work explores how quickly political and social movements are forgotten, with users of the web repeatedly jumping from one cause to another, never really considering what’s happening in the world around them. To me, the works are incredibly sombre, revelatory mediations on how lives are lived online and offline in the 21st century.

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​Curated by Bob Bicknell-Knight