Artist Duncan Poulton talks e-hoarding, the hyper saturation of contemporary image culture, co-opting online tropes, and creating texture in digital media.
by Ben Nicholson
Image courtesy of the artist.
Duncan Poulton’s process is one often defined by using a vast archive of material to create vibrant collages – in both still and moving image form – that wrestle with the complexities and contradictions of contemporary digital life. His solo debut exhibition, Factory Reset, took place at SET Lewisham in 2022 and he has elsewhere seen work presented and screened around the UK as well as in the USA, Germany, and Southeast Asia.
On the occasion of a joint exhibition called I’m Here But I’m Not a Cat, organized in collaboration with Daniel & Clara, Adonia Bouchehri, and Edwin Rostron, ALT/KINO sat down with Duncan to discuss his work.
ALT/KINO: What was the driver behind this exhibition, for you? This idea of moving beyond screen-based work is interesting and I'd be intrigued to hear your thoughts on the genesis of the exhibition and why it appealed?
Duncan Poulton: So, I think the others formulated it in their minds because they'd been chatting on Zoom from 2020. I knew them all separately and Adonia came to a solo show that I had at in London in 2022 and said they felt like I'd be a good person to be in the mix for this upcoming show. That solo show was called Factory Reset and was a lot about the interplay with screens; it was looking at moments where you're haunted by technology. For instance, during peak lockdown I was having nightmares that I was still on Zoom when I was in bed, or I saw my friend mistake a notepad for an iPad and was trying to use touch screen on a piece of paper. They were these moments where your behaviour is a response to the fact that you're so saturated by technology, like a form of muscle memory or Pavlovian response. For a while I've been thinking of I’m Here But I’m Not a Cat as being about our relationship with technology, but the work we include in it is not “techie” work per se. I’ve always had an uneasiness about this, as I feel I sit somewhere between different disciplines like photography, painting, new media, and perhaps don’t feel at home in any of them. I make work that is kind of about technology, but it's just the context, the background; I've accepted that this is the world I live within - this hyper-saturation, overload visual culture, an evaporation of the truth of digital images. I don't like harping on about those things because I can feel like I talk about it too much [laughs]... and that everyone probably knows already - or maybe they don't think about it as much as me. Anyway, I take all of that as a given and then I'm trying to make something more felt. I have this very habitual gathering - "e-hoarding" practice, as I call it - where I'm just hoovering up all this material from the internet, from charity shops, from car boot sales. It all goes into my archive and then I allow myself to improvise within that. The approach I take to making still collage works is quite painterly - fragments, offcuts and samples from this found material enter the work in a way a painter might dip their brush into a particular colour. So, to answer the question, I suppose the theme of the show is this interplay between being stuck in a screen-based existence and going out and being able to make and experience stuff, and this inseparable looping between those two states. The works I’m showing display this more intuitive sensibility, a tactility and play with a range of digital materials. Quite a few of them include digital painting techniques within them, scans of paper objects and traces of other forms of mark-making like graffiti. There is always this elusive, illusory trompe l'oeil confusion - confusing the viewer. But this set of works have a more tactile, archival feeling, as if they’re made from real material objects.
A/K: Can you explain a little bit about your "e-hoarding" practice?
DP: I suppose the whole "e-hoarding" thing started when I was on my BA at Brighton. I was trying to buy a camcorder, and I'm very indecisive, so I was looking at a lot of reviews which led me to this online subgenre of unboxing videos on YouTube. At the same time, I was also watching quite a few older appropriation filmmakers and was at a fork in the road where I could try re-cutting old cinema - like quite a lot of people had already done - or go down this YouTube rabbit hole of unboxing videos. I ended up doing that, and it was, kind of, the origin of this creative period. From then on, I got quite obsessed with this notion of the hyper-contemporary, the internet as a repository of mostly banal, unseen things. It felt like really fertile ground, something to respond to. The foundation of everything I do is this collecting. During lockdown it got pretty crazy in terms of the number of files I was saving - when life was nearly all online - but since I've been able to go out again, it's been more paper and scanned materials and objects. I guess it's almost like I've made my own internet, through this archive, by gathering things from 2015 until now. It's around 40,000 image files within that archive, now - plus however many found footage and sound clips I’ve amassed. It's gone on for that long at this point, it's become this self-portrait in the form of storage, where I find that things quite often recur – things that seem really obscure but I’ll realise I’d made the same search before, 2 years previous or something. So as much as I try to escape my ‘filter bubble’ or the confines of my personal algorithm profile, its there to be seen, amongst these disparate files.
Image courtesy of the artist.
A/K: Are you ever collecting with intention - in the sense that you're aiming towards something with the images and collecting with that end product already in mind - or do you collect and then find connections within the archive?
DP: I think the latter, really. I'll generally have found some image or piece of footage that's sticking in my head and that will act as an anchor point. So, with the still images, I'll throw that into Photoshop and then just start letting other things from the archive be magnetised towards that image. Quite often I'll be working at night and have been working on the same images for hours - and that anchor will then depart, and it might sow the seeds of two other works that I then work on simultaneously. So, I'm trying to let these subconscious imaginative processes occur - I'm not normally thinking "right, I need a beach ball for this," it's getting into this strange flow state in the wee hours of the night and letting accidents occur. Things tend to come together just at the point they’re seeming to collapse or be going nowhere.
A/K: It's interesting to hear you describe a flow state in the context of a practice in which you're wrangling such a huge archive of material. Are you dipping back into the archive for specific things you feel that you need? How is that working?
DP: Well, I'm two-screening [laughs]. I've got my archive up on the big screen and the edit on the laptop screen - so everything is always present at the same time. Quite often I'm heavily editing one single image, because I'm interested in how far I can go with it - erasing it, inverting it, filtering, stuff like that. I’m poking at the limits of the image, stretching it and pulling it apart. Then, when I get bored of doing that, I'll start scrolling again and drop in, maybe, five other images. Especially in the works that will be in this show there's a lot of very quick and aggressive erasing of images, often using the magic wand tool on Photoshop which picks up lots of similar colours but it will leave these horrible, blocky edges and digital artefacts. I tend to keep those imperfections in, to retain the aggression of the decision-making. How do I know when to stop? Usually when I have to go to bed [laughs].
A/K: You mentioned it briefly earlier, but I wandered if you could give a bit of context regarding your feelings about digital culture - oversaturated media landscapes, the non-existent truth of images. I'm interested particularly in how those feelings feed into the work that you're making.
DP: Yeah, sure. I suppose, even since starting that method of working in 2015, the landscape has changed so much. I'm quite drawn to this notion of the last person to know everything. I think there's a book called that, about the polymath Thomas Young. But just thinking about that in relation to today, and the total impossibility of even comprehending all the world's uploads in one hour - it's so exponential. I think my works give you something like the intense feeling of that disorientation and conflation of many different things, textures, and ideas - that it's impossible to live in the contemporary world without. I feel like it's really drawn out an apathy; it's gone beyond the point where people feel that they need to be particularly worried about the origins of an image, almost. Now it's going to become even more extreme with AI-generated images entering the flow and undermining whatever thread of authentic truth, or “proof”, that photography was associated with. The constructs and assumptions around images are being totally destabilized. It’s a very awkward and strange moment to be living through, for everyone. So, within an online landscape built on dwindling attention spans and proliferating content, for me the challenge becomes trying to find some new form of beauty, or a different mode of seeing, born from the excess of information.
A/K: That's fascinating to hear you talk about. It's almost like you've gone past the stage where you're trying to make art as a prophylactic against that situation - which is often the reflex response, forcing critical faculties back upon us by undermining our expectations of image authenticity - and instead are trying to find meaning in the world beyond those questions.
DP: [Laughs] Yeah... part of me just thinks about the generations that are coming up. If you were born after the advent of easily available AI-generative software, your outlook is going to be crazily different to even me, born in the 90s. At 30, would I already start to feel like a stick-in-the-mud for trying to hold on to some reverence of “aura” or do you just have to respond to this situation that we're in? Maybe I'll feel different about that in the future, it’s a really changeable area, conceptually and ethically, that we’re all trying to grapple with. The situation has often morphed again by the time you think you’ve got a shape of it.
A/K: It's quite different to hear someone who has those anxieties, but then is able to shelve them to some degree in the work that you produce. I suppose, as well as distancing yourself from that typical response to those concerns, you’re also embracing what you're actually anxious about. Do you feel that by doing that you're able to process, to some extent, those anxieties?
DP: Yes, probably. I mean, they say all art is a form of therapy, don't they? I've always been interested in YouTube in relation to that, that every experience you could have has been had, and commented upon (and probably monetised) by someone else. Especially because I used to suffer from insomnia quite a lot, I became quite interested in this idea that I was looking at so many YouTube videos that maybe they were a surrogate for my dreams, or an internet dreamscape, doing the job of populating my imaginary. Over the years, it's been interesting allowing that machinic influence on the mind, or to allow the human and the machine to become more and more intermingled. As time goes on I tend to approach this more pragmatically and think about what is actually happening, right now, in the larger culture (e.g. the mass uptake of something like ChatGPT), and, how can I involve, respond to or reflect it in my work, rather than ponder on it from afar or years after the fact.
Image courtesy of the artist.
A/K: I wondered about how you decide on the placement of certain materials into certain forms - in particular, I'm thinking of when your moving image works feature still images from your archive. Given your movement between moving and still work seems quite fluid, how do you decide which register you want to work in when you’re pulling from the same overall set of materials?
DP: I quite like adopting the aesthetics and tropes of certain formats. Like in my film If you're watching this now then this is for you (2022), which I made with Sally Beets who did the writing and voiceover, she made a note of all these TikTok video titles and rearranged them to form a poem that gives a sense of the anxiety those kind of apps can induce. So, that one is a TikTok-inspired format, and is one minute long. Going further back, my film Content Anxiety (2019) was more of a take on the YouTube format. That work has quite a few disparate, collaged images overlapping in the centre of the frame and then each one of these YouTuber voices that you can hear has their own looping animated icon in the corner of the screen, like branding. That film is a lot about self-branding and the worries people have around their relevance online, so everyone had their own little brand symbol which reflected what they were talking about. Back to the question, though; I think increasingly there's quite a fluidity between the formats I work in. When I have a solo show, I like making these immersive 'image worlds'. So, in my show Factory Reset in 2022, some of the original images from my archive were shown as stickers on the wall, but then appeared in the collages and then would also appear in video work. I quite like these recurring motifs across different formats, where the works come together to form a system of interrelations or linkages, for the viewer to bounce between.
A/K: I guess the TikTok and YouTube influences of those two video works are quite evident to the viewer without you having to explain that. Do you find yourself using influences or modes like that with your still work in the same way?
DP: Quite a lot of the works in the Factory Reset show were made in lockdown, so I was thinking about the prevalent media of that time; apps, websites, games. I used to play a lot of fantasy RPG games growing up, and you have these cursors that are swords, or hands, or a gauntlet - so I was kind of using that influence but also Google Docs, where you have many floating cursors on the same screen that represent different users. I quite liked reflecting on collage as a medium and having these floating, pixelated tooltip icons on the surface as if to represent multiple different editors, as if there were 20 people re-editing the work. Other collages appear to be screens - so they might have the edge of a monitor or seemingly clickable buttons, or layers of scratches, dust or grime - but then they'll also have a torn piece of paper, or they'll seem to have a pane of glass compressing them. So, there are a couple of real world and digital formats that inform that, but they're all a mixed together, undermining and complicating what we think we’re looking at.
A/K: From the work that you're showing in this exhibition, it appears that there is a mixture of digital and physical collage - are you going into specific pieces saying 'this will be a digital work' and 'this will be physical'?
DP: I'm trying at the moment to get to grips with how to be a real-world human [laughs]. Because nearly everything originated on the screen, I just find Photoshop such a powerful tool - the freedom of resizing, filtering, cutting things away so quickly, reversing things - but I'm trying to introduce physical collage more. Sometimes, though, it can feel kind of arbitrary, because I'm making a whole layer on Photoshop and then shipping it off to a printer, getting it back and then having to hand cut things. The show in 2022 had more of this papier mâché effect and was done with stickers and aerosol paint, combining those kinds of things - I want to get more into that in future.
A/K: Going back to something you just spoke about a moment ago, and the idea of these immersive installations. How do feel about your moving image work when plays in a cinema space, like it will in the screening accompanying this exhibition?
DP: I find it kind of funny to bring a YouTube video by some teenager from five years ago - when the original videos might have even been deleted by now, the user might have forgotten that they uploaded it - and then present it in this esteemed space of the cinema. Having this low-res and casually captured digital material on a big screen provokes a certain response in audiences, and I enjoy playing with the humour of that. I like the idea that the “throwaway” can be studied and dissected, and that it might tell us more about the world we’re living in that we first expect. There are quite a lot of artists that make moving image and are very particular about how they want the work to be shown, but I feel it'd be fairly rich for me to be that picky, considering the origin of the material. So, for me, it's about reaching audiences as much as possible, by whatever means - for me the work can be a portable thing, adapting to different contexts and environments. It has to exist in the flow.
I’m Here But I’m Not a Cat runs from 22 Sep - 1 Oct at SET Kensington.
Screenings of moving image work by the artists take place at Close-Up Film Centre on 23 September.
We have also conducted interviews with Adonia Bouchehri, Daniel & Clara, and Edwin Rostron.