_it's coming straight for us
_it's coming straight for us

_it’s coming straight for us

Who owns your reality?

Virtual reality, augmented reality, artificial intelligence, haptic, interactive experiences, our shared reality is a blend of digital and real worlds. We are collectively engaged in a fantastical, global mind experiment and a few companies are poised to appropriate our entire collective digital knowledge.

What have these techno-feudal overlords and their artificial intelligence in store for us? What happens to human exchange and relationships when we are constantly manipulated and prompted to market at each other 24/7?

What role will artists have in this branded new world?

This work explores the challenges artists face through disruptive tech such as AI. During a series of community arts workshops, with diverse community participants we challenge power & privilege across realities.

The metaverse is coming – how will we shape its stories, rules and values?

 
 

Mixed reality disclosure

This project was an exploration of the world most humans live in - mixed reality. During development we played with multiple digital platforms, including: Decentraland, Character Animate mo-cap, Stable Defusion, DALL-E, Premier Pro, Illustrator and AI assisted Photoshop.

All poems are human generated

All text on the website is human generated

All the photos were created by humans with analogue or digital cameras

Many of the images combine pieces of content, including some photo elements, that contain at least one generated with an AI tool or algorithm.

‘The Colony’ has morphed into the last and therefore largest global BigTech corporation ever. Ngarrindjeri artist, Clyde Rigney Jnr, has accepted the role as CEO to launch the NearNow, a dazzling, metaverse adjacent agency, with a series of empowering memes aimed at artists. This online exhibition explores the wonderful world of marketing in the face of climate catastrophes.

 
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The Colony was also behind the highly successful multi-art project, _this breath.

_this breath is not mine to keep

 
 

_ this breath is not mine to keep is a philosophical, deeply political pudding - a shout out that humans are transient, we can’t own or control our moment by moment chemical dance with life and death and we are intimately and inescapably connected to everything - so let’s collectively pop the seductive delusions of human supremacy to create loving, equitable beliefs - let’s reframe how we live…

We live in an unjust, brutal global empire - and this statement can be dismissed as humbug if we live in the lee of privilege. 

This project shares provocations, creative responses and actions that explore how we - our emotions - are manipulated to maintain intertwined supremacies (sexism, racism, ableism, etc) and this constant barrage of supremacist imperatives enslaves us all.

We coined ‘everyday supremacy’ to unpack the terrifying, messy, ubiquitous system of oppressions and privileged rewards that reside in our colonized normality. It is this thinking-behind-the-thinking that dictates our negotiations and collaborative visioning, if we don’t train critical literacy and collective play…

The ice caps are melting, we can buy fluorescent, styrofoam infused, sparkly slime for kids if they still know how to play, vs perform; firestorms create their own weather, and the globally connected have become outraged experts of nothing, streaming platitudes for a dying planet – yet in this absurd drama, all we have is now and each other...

So if we are life on earth participating in our eradication for greed, yet we are simply stories shared among friends, clinging to atomized life rafts, enacting autonomy in a supremacist shit storm, what stories will we share?

_this breath is an absurdist tilt at existential joy.