What does the world look like in the moments before it changes forever?
Christopher Kulendran Thomas' work explores the complex legacies of imperialism. A British artist of Sri Lankan-Tamil descent, Christopher has been using artificial intelligence technologies over much of the last decade to examine the foundational fictions of Western individualism. His new exhibition, Safe Zone, features two bodies of work that manifest the historical mediums of soft power: a series of paintings that metabolise Sri Lanka’s colonial art history and a video work that auto-edits American television footage.
At the centre of this exhibition is Peace Core (2024), a new video work of infinite duration produced in collaboration with Annika Kuhlmann. This rotating sphere of 24 screens transmits a continuous stream of television footage, broadcast in the moments before TV channels cut live to the unfolding events of September 11 2001. Peace Core’s purpose-built AI algorithm stitches over 24,000 clips into an ever-evolving sequence, accompanied by a soundscape that continually remixes the sounds and music broadcast that morning on American TV. The work draws on the editing language of early #corecore, an internet aesthetic combining seemingly unrelated videos and music to evoke a shared emotional response to the nature of contemporary existence.
Nearly a quarter-century later, many of the clips from chat shows, news, music videos and commercials still resonate. On the surface, Peace Core conjures the allure of seemingly simpler times. Yet, the perpetual remixing of sound and image, whilst on the one hand infinitely extending that illusion of innocence, also creates new meanings, informed by our knowledge of the tragedies that followed.