Scaffolding (Preface)

Archie Barry is a Naarm (Melbourne)-based artist working in performance and video. Their recent video, Scaffolding (Preface), is premised on an imagined society of children who have evolved a fugitive mode of non-lingual communication in order to evade contemporary and late-modern conditions of surveillance.

Joining footage of microscopic organisms, rock pools and construction sites, an elusive ‘narrator’ – the vibrant, 3D-animated cranial persona glimpsed at the close of the video – vocalises without a prefrontal cortex. This character is both a figure of wonder and an agent of evasion, eluding the ubiquitous technologies of facial recognition.

While many of Barry’s works explore presence and self-portraiture through the affective and sensorial potential of the body, prostheses and voice, Scaffolding (Preface) celebrates the self-determined and embodied possibilities of vocalising and listening.