Sorcha Dallas

Preface It will hopefully seem apt rather than perverse to submit a review about an exhibition that has come and gone to a journal whose theme is the failure of technology and the future that never arrived. A refusal to buy into reactionary politics or contemporary paranoia distinguished Mulholland’s solo show of last year; his complex and elegant responses to the phenomenon of RFIDS emanating a much needed sense of ‘be aware’ rather than simply ‘be afraid, be very afraid’.

Craig Mulholland: ARPHID, Whitechapel Project Space, 2005.

If an exhibition that deals with the latest in high tech tracking devices leads you to imagine a darkened gallery space full of flickering computer screens then erase that image and start again. Craig Mulholland does not appropriate new technologies in the manner of Net activists such as RTMARK, but instead uses drawing, sculpture and animation to highlight the invisible and invasive power of technology in daily life. The show’s title alludes to RFIDs, Radio Frequency Identification tags that allow the carrier to be continuously tracked and scanned for personal information, both at close range and from great distances. The exhibition is far from being a literal expose of this phenomenon since the artist refrains from re-telling the debates that circulate around RFID tagging and instead creates a surreal world where electronic components are anthropomorphised and viruses take shape as delicate graphite drawings.

The setting is therefore white cube rather than black box; all of the individual works crafted by Mulholland work together to form one large installation of thematically linked components. Recurring motifs set up dialogues between objects: the RFID tag that would normally be barely visible to the human eye is scaled up and rendered as a metal sculpture on a plinth; it also forms the starting point for a framed drawing and acts as the main protagonist in an animation screened on a monitor in the centre of the installation. The film shows the tag floating through a Victorian shopping arcade, stealing the identity of the artist in the form of his passport and wandering through crowds in the manner of a flaneur. This computer generated work is the most overtly technological, however, with its black and white graphics and slow pace it blends in rather than dominates the other works, its eerie soundtrack acting as an accompaniment to show. There is subversive humour in this network of failed communication devices: the useless RFID tag sits adjacent to a melted mobile phone and silver tongue; a white arrow painted on the floor points mutely at objects; a hand drawn nodal diagram flows out of a real fuse box painted white to disguise its presence within the gallery, extending onto the blank wall in a purely decorative gesture. Since the installation itself suggests a network of related yet individual components, the viewer on entering the space and moving between objects feels like yet another addition to this network.

The exhibition is a continuation of a show developed for The Changing Room in Stirling at the time of the Gleneagles G8. The summit brought together the world’s superpowers and the show sought to question who really has control over our movements. Anyone living in London where the show has since manifested itself, may be aware of the RFID tag that they carry inside their Oyster Card but less aware of the objects that they own that employ covert tagging, such as razor blades, medicines and clothing. When it is in the interests of corporations as well as government to track our movements and consumer habits, the silent stealth of such innovations means that we do not always know to whom we have lost our freedom.

The artist chooses to highlight these issues without being didactic; it is up to the viewer on leaving the gallery as to whether they wish to research further into this technological phenomenon and its implications for civil liberties. Mulholland’s references are multi layered, literary as well as technological: the wandering tag in the animation also references Poe’s The Man of the Crowd who can not bear to be alone, a state which is impossible within 21st Century surveillance society. Mulholland does not play the role of art activist, reworking already familiar arguments around systems of control, but through rendering the microscopic visible and the immaterial material, he investigates a contentious subject in formal terms without ever losing the political message.