Irresistible Drift

About The Exhibition

Peter Evers' work explores the (de)construction of identity in a digital age. His work is underpinned by concerns about the exponential growth of technology and its dominant and uncontrollable influence over human identity. The work treads the line between the authentic and the virtual, the real and the representational.

Evers’ most recent work, Irresistible Drift has appropriated video and motion capture sequences from the Perceiving Systems department at the Max Planck Institute in Tuebingen where human subjects have been monitored and filmed as they move about a space. There are two stages to the installation at Belfast Exposed; the first film shows a human ‘subject’ attached to a myriad of sensors against a green screen backdrop. In the film the subject moves, dances, and jumps up and down providing an unsettling and dispassionate performance. He has been reduced to a puppet in this technological transaction where his every movement is recorded for research. In the second film we see how this research might be cultivated to better simulate ‘real’ human movement in digital form.

By interrogating the most advanced processes of image/ identity making within the digital sphere, Evers interrupts the notion that there is a linear and inevitable trajectory of technological ‘progress’. Instead he invites the viewer to pause and re-consider their relationship to these rapid and uncontrollable advances in technology.