Beatrice Gibson: F for Fibonacci
Laura Bartlett Gallery is pleased to present F for Fibonacci, the first exhibition at the gallery by British artist Beatrice Gibson.
F for Fibonacci is a new film that takes as its departure point American author William Gaddis鈥� epic modernist novel JR (1975). An eerily prescient, biting social satire, JR tells the story of a precocious 11 year-old capitalist who, with the unwitting help of his school鈥檚 resident composer, inadvertently creates the single greatest virtual empire the world has seen, spun largely from the anonymity of the school鈥檚 pay phone.
F for Fibonacci develops a particular episode from JR, in which a televised music lesson is scrambled with a maths class on derivatives inside the mind of its child protagonist. Musings on aleatory music become muddled with virtual stock pickings and a theory of 鈥榤arket noise鈥�. Unfolding through the modular machine aesthetics of the video game Minecraft, text book geometries, graphic scores, images from physics experiments, and cartoon dreams, blend with images from wall street: stock market crashes, trading pits, algorithms and transparent glass.
As well as the writing of Gaddis, the film draws on the work of little-known British experimental educator and composer John Paynter, who infamously took Cornelius Cardew, John Cage and Karlheinz Stockhausen into primary schools, and who, along with better known figures such as art critic Herbert Read, was at the forefront of utopian post-war pedagogical movements orientated around child-centerededucation. Following Paynter鈥檚 lead, Gibson worked closely with 11 year old Clay Barnard Chodzko on a number of the film鈥檚 production elements, commissioning him to design an office in Minecraft and develop an existing character of his, Mr Money.Gibson and Chodzko鈥檚 ramblings on the subject of his protagonist lead the viewer through F for Fibonacci鈥檚 hallucinatory soup.
Mirroring JR鈥檚 preoccupation with indeterminancy and abstraction, at the centre of F for Fibonnaci the utopian and dystopian dimensions of abstraction are flipped: the avant-garde desires of Cage, Stockhausen and Paynter meet the entropic dimensions of dematerialized financial systems. If abstraction ultimately supposes authorial withdrawal: the ceding of control of production to the laws of chance is, of course, a gamble. But it鈥檚 not just the buccaneering financiers of deregulated markets that know how to roll dice. Gibson鈥檚 practice is also predicated on the idea of creating open ended compositional structures, landscapes in which an asynchronous assembly of elements: actors, objects, and images, are placed together and left to dance. The aleatory nature of this way of working affords F for Fibonacci its recursivity; the content and construction of the film follow the same methodology.
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Laura Bartlett Gallery is pleased to present F for Fibonacci, the first exhibition at the gallery by British artist Beatrice Gibson.
F for Fibonacci is a new film that takes as its departure point American author William Gaddis鈥� epic modernist novel JR (1975). An eerily prescient, biting social satire, JR tells the story of a precocious 11 year-old capitalist who, with the unwitting help of his school鈥檚 resident composer, inadvertently creates the single greatest virtual empire the world has seen, spun largely from the anonymity of the school鈥檚 pay phone.
F for Fibonacci develops a particular episode from JR, in which a televised music lesson is scrambled with a maths class on derivatives inside the mind of its child protagonist. Musings on aleatory music become muddled with virtual stock pickings and a theory of 鈥榤arket noise鈥�. Unfolding through the modular machine aesthetics of the video game Minecraft, text book geometries, graphic scores, images from physics experiments, and cartoon dreams, blend with images from wall street: stock market crashes, trading pits, algorithms and transparent glass.
As well as the writing of Gaddis, the film draws on the work of little-known British experimental educator and composer John Paynter, who infamously took Cornelius Cardew, John Cage and Karlheinz Stockhausen into primary schools, and who, along with better known figures such as art critic Herbert Read, was at the forefront of utopian post-war pedagogical movements orientated around child-centerededucation. Following Paynter鈥檚 lead, Gibson worked closely with 11 year old Clay Barnard Chodzko on a number of the film鈥檚 production elements, commissioning him to design an office in Minecraft and develop an existing character of his, Mr Money.Gibson and Chodzko鈥檚 ramblings on the subject of his protagonist lead the viewer through F for Fibonacci鈥檚 hallucinatory soup.
Mirroring JR鈥檚 preoccupation with indeterminancy and abstraction, at the centre of F for Fibonnaci the utopian and dystopian dimensions of abstraction are flipped: the avant-garde desires of Cage, Stockhausen and Paynter meet the entropic dimensions of dematerialized financial systems. If abstraction ultimately supposes authorial withdrawal: the ceding of control of production to the laws of chance is, of course, a gamble. But it鈥檚 not just the buccaneering financiers of deregulated markets that know how to roll dice. Gibson鈥檚 practice is also predicated on the idea of creating open ended compositional structures, landscapes in which an asynchronous assembly of elements: actors, objects, and images, are placed together and left to dance. The aleatory nature of this way of working affords F for Fibonacci its recursivity; the content and construction of the film follow the same methodology.
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