‘Hand Made Machines & Machine Made Hands’ is a multi-media installation presenting a body of kinetic and sonic sculptures within a dystopian glowing pink laboratory clad in black PVC. Combining steel and charred oak sculptures with hospital mechanisms, biospheres, scans of animal brains, a restored organ, plants and re-purposed analogue technology, this installation explores ideas around the imminent extinction of insect species, the evolution of technology from the ancient axe to contemporary prosthetics, the symbolism of monuments and ideas emerging from science fiction and science fact.
Sol Bailey-Barker uses repurposed and obsolete technology, sound equipment, DIY contact mics and ‘alien-megalithic’ sculptural forms to create an (extra)terrestrial sound machine. This sensory-informational web poses questions about our obsessive relationship with technology and the kinds of knowledge it can mediate. Between conspiracy theory and recorded data, ARE WE ALONE? is an introspective, extraterrestrial investigation into Bailey-Barker’s own practice, ancient tools and Cosmic noise. In 1899 Nikola Tesla documented what was thought to be the first extraterrestrial message, discovered during his pioneering experiments with radio waves. Since then thousands of scientists and amateurs have built radio telescopes to listen to the stars. "The universe is information and we are stationary in it, not three dimensional and not in space or time. The information fed to us we hypostatise into the phenomenal world… The phenomenal world does not exist, it is a hypostasis of the information processed by the mind." Philip K Dick