Finn Dovey
Finn Dovey is a Bristol based artist and writer, attempting to unpick the postindustrial landscape through ethnographic research, digital archaeology and 3D localities. Experimenting with ways of exploring dualities at play in varying landscapes; Coherence/Incoherence, Sanctuary/Asylum, Antrhopocene/Arcadia, Physical/Digital, he aims to construct new fantasised, dreamt emplacements, which morph between physicality and ethereality.
Combining poetic location based soliloquies with virtual 3D landscapes constructed partly from imagined emplacements, partly from 3D scans taken from journeys in physical space to imagine pseudo emplacements, which draw on the psycho-digital nature of contemporary spaces. A fascination with atopic spaces or non-places, and heterotopias is a constant in his work, which ties to a feeling of degradation in space centred around gentrification and sanitisation. More recently he has been exploring the concept of latent space, working with adversarial networks as a way of thinking about frozen time.
Finn graduated with a degree in New Media, Culture & Practice from UWE in 2018. Upon graduating, he formed Latch Collective with a number of other artists. Operating out of the Old Malt House until earlier this year, the events space hosted and curated a number of exhibitions and residences, a monthly pop up cinema, as well as supporting local music collectives through club nights.
Works
Adventures in Latent Space
These short video works of Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) are a prototype for a larger GAN tapestry involving a combination of image generating style GANs and excerpts from significant dream experiences I have encountered.
I feel that GANs are a lot like computational dreams, sharing many similarities to our own psychological conjurings. On the surface they appear jumbled or even nonsensical, and yet they are born from large databases of information, images as a memory. The network interprets these images in Latent Space, the unconscious hinterland of the machine, outputting a codified message, morphing relics from a sea of memories.
By combining snapshots from the far reaches of my brain and the computers, I attempt to explore the psycho-digital unconscious and the symbolism within.
Awash in the Viewport
This audiovisual work is an exploration of digital landscapes, atopic or frozen time and latent space as emplacement. It borrows from digitality, physicality, and psychological sub emplacements, in an attempt to traverse and comment on space in the age of anthropocene. Thinking about what constitutes data and using it as reference point to draw on the hauntological eeriness of memory and the hyperstitional nature of the digital diaspora. Removing physical artefacts using 3D scanning from their natural localities to create forced geographies, as a form of myth making. Envisioning a time in which these objects have become relics. The piece aims to highlight the static and stagnating nature of physical space and the ever expanding present, through the timeless realm of the 3D viewport.
The piece was created for a multiscreen installation.