Andrew Thomas Huang
Flesh Nest
about
Artist filmmaker Andrew Thomas Huang lives and works in Los Angeles. He studied Fine Art and Animation at the University of Southern California, graduating in 2007. Huang's film and video work has exhibited at The Museum of Modern Art, NYC; MoMA PS1; The Barbican Centre, London; Postmasters Gallery, NYC; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. As an experimental filmmaker whose work bridges the gap between video art and film, he has developed a strong reputation for his collaborative practice, having worked extensively with Icelandic artist Bjork, among others including Kelela, Perfume Genius, Sigur Ros, Thom Yorke, British director Joe Wright, and fashion designers Iris van Herpen, Gareth Pugh and threeASFOUR.
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“Flesh Nest” is a nine-part sci-fi video series illustrating a post-apocalyptic digital purgatory imagined by filmmaker / video artist Andrew Thomas Huang. Originally conceived as nine looping video projections designed for gallery exhibition, “Flesh Nest” premieres on Nowness as a condensed short film, each featuring excerpts from multi-layered cybernetic wastelands inhabited by zombie avatars, cyborg titans, null objects, scrambled matrices of digital detritus and tangled virtualscapes. This Inferno-like world is inspired in part by the apocalyptic panoramas of Bosch & Bruegel paintings, and also in part by the book Networks of New York by artist & writer Ingrid Burrington who documents the fragmented palimpsest of Internet infrastructure woven into our physical urban surroundings. Created with motion capture system Perception Neuron, "Flesh Nest" features costumes by Ashley Eva Brock and choreography by Nina McNeely, the latter who worked with Huang to create a digital library of behaviors and movement inspired by primal human activities that regularly enact and proliferate themselves across Internet fiber lines. "Flesh Nest" offers a reality parallel to our own, in which such behaviors are mapped onto androgynous humanoid proxies that aimlessly collide and interact, superimposing themselves over desolate, cable-strewn geologies and junk landscapes that operate more like charnel grounds: liminal spaces of half-mortal, half-digital existence. Rather than present a digital world made up of the corporate sterility of server rooms, streaming sequences of 1s and 0s, or UI screengrabs, “Flesh Nest” is an attempt to represent our digital reality as it physically is: a fleshy, tangled, messy collision of human behavior mapped and propagated via snaking cable lines across a decaying and irreversibly modified planet.
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Images credit : Andrew Thomas Huang