Sebastian Koseda’s first solo performance, Silk to Silicon, combines moving images, woven fabrics, and graphic design to highlight the conflicts between automation, artists and workers, and technological advances.
The exhibit pays homage to the Luddites of the early 19th century, who were accomplished craftsmen who became machine-smashing Luddites. With growing global concern about the impact of exponential acceleration on jobs, skills, livelihoods, and workers’ rights, Koseda asks, “Are we going to see a Luddite renaissance?”
Sebastian Koseda says on the official ‘silk to silicon’ website (which accompanies the actual exhibition) that in 1779, the Luddite movement fought against the machines when their trade was threatened by power looms. They demolished mechanical equipment throughout England in protest against devices that were “injurious to mankind”. ‘nearly 250 years later, the ghost of ned ludd haunts us, his looms weaving repeating patterns as we watch the fourth industrial revolution.’
Ghosts of the industrial past loom large at Nottingham’s BACKLIT Gallery, a former textile factory. The show begins with a specially commissioned woven image of Ned Ludd, the legendary character who led the Luddite uprising. The portrait, inspired by the iconic 1812 painting of ‘General Ludd’, was woven on a computerized Jacquard loom by textile artist Sally Holditch.
Koseda has made two new videos that look at our interaction with robots and modern technologies.
The first, a CGI movie showing a robot arm creating a self-portrait, shows an adorable gesture of self-reflection that gives the robot a human dimension as it seems to have its own ideas and goals.
The second, a film Drones emerge from a lonely landscape in a second image, ‘The March of the Machines’, to wreak havoc in an imaginary London financial district. The drones, carrying banners demanding “Rights for Robots.”
Koseda takes us on a chronological journey to ask important ethical questions, prompting us to imagine our shared futures through a lens that accommodates innate human anxieties, real or distorted, around narratives of progress and creativity, using moving images, fabrics and graphic design. to explore these topics.
This work can be seen from February 25 to 27, 2022 in backlit gallery.
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