New Faces: Yuri Pattison

Photo by Owen Richards Photo by Owen Richards

Yuri Pattison’s practice switches between internet-based platforms and the non-digital world with the same fluidity with which we experience our everyday lives. “In many ways the internet feels like the most natural environment and the quickest and easiest medium to for me use,” he says. “I think of successful artworks as hyperlinks to wider knowledge.” Critical of surveillance technologies and the circulation of metadata, Pattison inhabits an online reality populated by crypto-anarchists and search algorithms, where even meteorites end up on eBay.

Through his installations and web-based projects, Pattison creates temporary islands of alternative economic and social activity. Repurposed Google servers support models that propose alternatives to an increasingly neoliberal online landscape. “I treat data as I would care for a physical object,” he explains, perhaps referencing an ongoing series featuring fragments of the 2013 Chelyabinsk meteor – which ended up on eBay – brought back down to earth a second time as 3D prints generated from images posted alongside the listings.

In 2014, Pattison had shows at Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw, and at London’s Cell Project space. In January this year he appeared alongside super-curator Hans Ulrich Obrist at the DLD conference – the annual global tech summit in Munich. Embarking on an 18-month residency with Chisenhale Gallery and Create, Pattison has recently begun to develop work as a member of London Hackspace – a technology-focused peer network that facilitates skill sharing, from lock picking to robotics and biohacking. “East London is dominated by corporate initiatives like silicon roundabout and the new tech city, but hacker spaces propose alternative models for self-organisation.”
Text by Katie Guggenheim Taken from Sleek 45 – Silent Spring More: Other new faces to watch out for in the art world More: Ian Cheng’s singing avatars