STAY AT HOME | ALICE BUCKNELL

STAY AT HOME #06

ALICE BUCKNELL
Welcome to Nütropix 


Press Release

[The art happens here]
Annka Kultys Gallery’s online platform dedicated to the showcasing of digital art in its natural habitat, so to speak.  The creation in 2020 of [The art happens here] provides a natural extension to the gallery’s offline programme which has as one of its strengths the presentation of “digital natives” or artists making art that engages with technology and the internet.

PRESS RELEASE

Annka Kultys is pleased to present Alice Bucknell’s video Welcome to Nütropix  (2020) as the sixth instalment of  the gallery’s online exhibition Stay at home, a presentation of new digital works produced by artists in response to the coronavirus pandemic.  On every Sunday of the lockdown during Stay at home, a new artist will be showcased on AKG’s recently launched online platform [The art happens here].   Bucknell’s video are on show for the sixth week of Stay at home, following on from Allan Gardner’s Infowars Made Me Hardcore (2020), James Knott’s Crisis Du Jour series.  Episode 1 Eggs (2019) and Episode 2 Beans in Isolation (2020) , Jillian Mayer’s You’ll Be Okay, Adad Hannah’s Social Distancing Video Portraits, and the opening show, James Irwin’s Surface Collider (23032020).

AKG is also announcing all gallery benefits (i.e., profits after the artist has been compensated in the usual manner) from featured digital works sold via [The art happens here] will be donated to the National Emergencies Trust.  The purchasers’ generosity will help to financially support the featured artists during this unprecedented period when non-essential shops are closed, including art museums and commercial galleries, leading to postponed exhibitions for artists, and ensuring at least part of artists’ incomes can be maintained.

Produced while in lockdown, Welcome to Nütropix is the latest instalment of the E-Z Kryptobuild video series. E-Z Kryptobuild is a speculative real estate company that offers high-net-worth individuals the opportunity to invest in a luxury life raft for the end of times.

In this video, viewers embark on a virtual tour of Nütropix, E-Z Kryptobuild’s signature palm tree-shaped floating island. Located somewhere in the South Pacific Ocean (for now), Nütropix offers a variety of eco-friendly architect- designed residences for its clients to call home. Named after Nootropics, a type of cognitive performance enhancing drug popular among Silicon Valley acolytes, the island is a vision of a free-wheeling technological utopia. Liberated from disease, centralized government, and sales tax, it is a neoliberal’s wet dream, rendered in a glittering CGI alter-reality where the party never stops and the sun never sets.

Representing a total integration of Instagram-friendly eco-chic environmentalism and cutting-edge technology, Nütropix boasts such innovations as solar- harvesting algae panels, “Smart Palm” routers providing 5G connectivity, and a modular cell structure enabling the island to reconfigure itself limitlessly. Complete with swimming pools, casinos, speed yachts, dozens of restaurants, and health clubs, Nütropix enables its residents to ride out the COVID-19 pandemic in style.

Welcome to Nütropix responds to what the artist describes as a slow apocalypse, recently sped up by the largest public health crisis since WWII. The steady creep of alt-right politics, climate change, and economic instability over the past decade has accelerated through the indefinite closure of national borders and the collapse of the global economy. With the arrival of COVID-19, we have fallen into a panic-driven isolationism: the total opposite of the limitless connectivity and sci- fi utopias dreamed up in the globalization years, the wealthiest era of human history.

Departing from these conditions, which have become intensified in a new level of global instability caused by the pandemic, Welcome to Nütropix presents the irresistible fantasy of a “fast-track ticket out of crisis”. It reflects on the language and aesthetics of disaster capitalism and the techno-utopian belief systems that govern technological entrepreneurs from Silicon Valley to the Dubai Desert, and it examines the ways that architecture and design are embroiled in these fantasies. It is a hijacking of consumer dopamine, a seamless solutionism, a hallucinogenic vision of an alternative future that’s freed from the impending global meltdown we were teetering into, anyway. In many ways, Welcome to Nütropix is an obvious scam, but it also a warning sign of things to come.

BIOGRAPHY
With a background as an art and architecture critic, Alice Bucknell current work utilizes speculative fiction to address contemporary ideas of technological utopias and the role of architecture in contributing to global inequity and ecological destruction. 

Bucknell participated in international exhibitions, symposiums, and residencies, most recently the Wrong Biennale, the Canadian Center for Architecture, and  Serpentine Galleries. 

Alice Bucknell was born in 1993 in Sarasota, FL and lives and works in London.

Annka Kultys Gallery