Being adverse and sceptical of new technologies used to entrap minds with specialised propaganda and manipulated suggestion. Hardy attempts to subvert obsolete technology towards creating a positive direction that offers truth and narrative as subjective.
Creating video installations using analogue electronic equipment wrought from TV studios, he presents arrays of monitors shown as symbolic motifs.
The video sequences are produced by physical manipulation of machines, which is the performative action that accepts noise, error, redundancy and amplification of phenomenon. Using feedback, the complex systems of machines are stimulated to produce the content for the monitors. Sound is generated from the video signal and vice versa, which interact together to produce mediative video sculptures suggesting a tribal, and totemic influence.
The installations are physical representations of the schematic diagrams showing feedback loops. The monitors are programmed with the recorded video post-performance to be presented as 'static' monument to the event. The monument becomes then a video sculpture composed of video loops, which are void of sequential narrative and has no beginning or end.
Having worked with analogue equipment since the early 90's, Hardy has an affinity with the physical element and sees the video as being an object rather than a virtual electronic portrayal of image and sound. Being immediate and sensitive, video is able to powerfully display suggestion of my ideas in the age where our video-literacy is highly proficient.
He pursues the most simplified and direct approach of display by using the primal symbolic forms of circles, lines, triangles and squares. Through gesture the forms are interrupted and modified in order to create elaborate 'landscapes' and 'textures' promoting reverie.
"With the truth being understood as subjective, the video sculptures I create do not limit freedom of thought, but stimulate choice. I aim to avoid manipulating the viewer by presenting 'video as truth', my work allows the video to function ultimately as the meditative stage for the mind, which unravels its own truth."
James Alec Hardy was born in Colchester England in 1979. He completed his studies at Camberwell College of Arts in 2002 and has been based in London since.
