It was because of defasten that this exhibition swelled to the size that it is. You see we already had a full roster when i stumbled across Density 1. I immediately called Geoffrey to see if we could make room for another piece or two, luckily Geoffrey is a very laid back and open-minded guy (the perfect traits for collaborating on a project like this) and so i sent an acquisition request off to Montréal.

All three of these works deal with place, self and language; but i find that Density 1 is perhaps the most successful at incorporating all three of these notions into a cohesive whole. After situating the viewer with those slow drifting freezes of various common locales, things go silent and a series of blinked images return one to a solid placement within one’s own body – one can’t help but feel that one is looking “out” at the images. Then a return to broader urbanscapes and finally to an aerial view of what appears to be a rather barren landscape. So it is that defasten moves one from the familiar to self to community to environment; and quite fluidly at that.

If one has viewed all three of defasten’s videos, one will notice common themes and hooks running through the set. One also gets a sense of the future, or at least the fiction of a future. And though there is an obvious reliance upon science and technology, he keeps bringing us back to our own confused notions of self and the inadequacy of the filters we attempt to apply to our perceptions and communications. I am under the impression that defasten is not content with easy answers, nor seduced by the very technology that he employs in his videos and animation.

He refers to the theories of Derrida when speaking about the origins of these videos, but that seems a bit convenient. When reflecting upon them it is Heidegger’s critique of technology that comes to mind, for example, “The will to mastery becomes all the more urgent the more technology threatens to slip from human control.” It is this play between controlling and being controlled that seems foremost in all three of these videos, and the questions that they and Heidegger raise are ones we have yet to adequately answer. Yet it is fast becoming apparent that our very survival is very likely dependent on rising to the challenge presented by such a line of questioning.