Alex Pearl
Multimedia artist Alex Pearl explores the world through the breaks and slippages caused by his relationship with technology. In 2018 he completed a PhD (at MMU and FACT Liverpool) on mechanical breakdown and anthropomorphism. This involved making, and pretending to dress up as, a series of badly made robots. Current work uses gif animation to unravel the strange afterlife of images in the digital realm.
Thaumatrope with head, 2020, is one of a series of flickering animated gifs that mimic the workings of the 19th century optical toy, the thaumatrope. A thaumatrope, literally wonder turner, cosists of a card disc with different images on each side. When the disc is spun on its axis the images are combined to form one. The most common thaumatropic iteration is a bird and a cage, a play on the binaries of nature and culture.
The GIF, however, allows multiple images to be flashed before the viewer’s eyes. Endlessly looping, it breaks down causality and the viewer is involved in a moment without beginning or end. This is completely unlike the experience of cinema in which the expectation and fulfilment of consequence is central to its narrative. The gif, in presenting a ceaseless return produces an uneasy space for habitation, a vibrating moment in time.
Alex Pearl is a UK-based multimedia artist. Born in 1968 in Manchester, Pearl went to Birmingham Polytechnic to gain his undergraduate degree in Fine Art, followed by a Masters in History of Art & Design at the University of Central England, in Birmingham. He was then engaged in several UK solo exhibitions and commissions, such as Whitstable Biennale, 2010, and Fishmarket Gallery, 2012. This led him to be selected to participate in group exhibitions on an international scale, from Spain, Greece, Austria, and Germany to the US, Russia, Australia, and South Korea. In 2018, Alex Pearl earned a PhD from Manchester Metropolitan University and FACT Liverpool, specialising in mechanical breakdown and anthropomorphism. This in-depth study contributed to the development of his current work, which uses GIF animation to explore the “afterlife of images in the digital realm.” His recent solo exhibitions in the UK have taken place at The Executive, Ipswich, 2020, the Small House Gallery, London, 2021, and his forthcoming exhibition at Atlas House, in Suffolk.
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