Charlie's video, text and performance works interrogate the affective qualities of digital technologies and their use in the control and management of populations and environments. He employs strategies of re-appropriation and speculative fiction, often taking on personas of anonymous collectives and hybrid machines, to outline subversive plans for enhancing and escaping control mechanisms and renegotiating relations between human and non human.
Whilst masquerading as a fiction — reports from a future dystopia transmitted in episodes by a posthuman life force — the world of the Notes series, like all dystopias, mirrors the concerns of the present moment, specifically 21st Century systems of control that perpetuate ideologies of fear.
In Archimeters a plan is outlined for appropriating the near-empty ghost city of Ordos, China, and constructing ‘a fully integrated autopoetic and auto-affective mechanism’, based within the Ordos Art Museum and capable of inflicting new forms of control on all things.
Re-Writing the Overcode channels the non human utterances of various obsolete and decaying technologies who exist across multiple temporalities and geographies. The work is in part an elegy to human machines and their relation to the earth’s resources and also a form of exposure device, bringing into view the mesh of interrelations between virtual technologies, raw materials and forms of waste.
2017 Soon we will become output, Stanley Picker Gallery, London
2013 I am Algorithm, Aspex, Portsmouth
2013 I am Algorithm, Exeter Phoenix, Exeter
2011 Notes I,II &III, Alma Enterprises, London
2010 Notes I,II &III, Spike Island, Bristol
2018 Visions in the Nunnery, Nunnery Gallery, London
2017 WRO Media Art Biennale, WRO Center, Poland
2016 NeON Digital Arts Festival, Dundee
2016 Selected 6 (touring video programme curated by Videoclub), touring to Whitechapel Gallery, Watershed, Plymouth Arts Centre, CCA Glasgow and 6 other UK venues)
2016 BothSides Now 3: Screenings in East Asia (touring venues across East Asia: curated by Videoclub)
2016 Silent Signal, a UK wide touring show for Wellcome Trust Large Arts Commission produced by Animate Projects including: Quad, Derby; Vivid Projects, Birmingham; Lifespace, Dundee; Oberhausen Short Film Festival
2015 The Signal and the rock, Performance Lecture, China Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing
2015 Film Open (selected by Steven Cairns ICA) touring to: ICA, London; Spike Island, Bristol; Transmission, Glasgow; Eastside Projects, Birmingham; Castlefield, Manchester
2012 SUB 12, Substation, Melbourne
2012 The London Open, Whitechapel Gallery, London
2012 Experimentica, Chapter, Cardiff
2011 The Box Season 5, Aberystwyth Arts Centre, Wales (August - November)
2011 New Methods of Diversification and Sustainability, Grizedale Arts, Cumbria
2011 Bloomberg New Contemporaries, Archive Film, ICA, London
2017 Curator and Organiser of Digital Ecologies and the Anthropocene, Bath Spa University, Bath
2016 Paper presented at Silent Signal Conference, University of Dundee
2016 Film presented at Warm Bodies, Cold Machines, Dusseldorf
2016 Paper presented at STRATA Conference, Aberystwyth University
2013 Paper presented and Organiser of Geologies of Value and Vestige Conference, Kingston University, and curator of films at Stanley Picker Gallery
2013 ‘Rewriting the overcode’, Transwhat Symposium, Supermarket, Berlin
2012 - ‘Escape from the electronic super-panopticon’, Space and Place, Mansfield College, Oxford
2011-18 AHRC PHD Studentship, Kingston University
2014-16 Wellcome Trust Large Arts Award
2011 Emergency 5 Aspex Gallery Winner
2011 Grizedale Arts Residency Programme, Cumbria, UK
2009 Residency, Galerie Klatovy / Klenová, Czech Republic
2008 Start Point European Academy Awards, Winner of the Prize of the Galerie Klatovy / Klenová
2009 ECO 09, Winner, Exeter Phoenix
2008 Sommerakademie Residency: dragged down into lowercase, Paul Klee Centre, Bern, Switzerland
2007 AGORA Residency, PACT, Essen, Germany
2005 Grizedale Arts Residency Programme, Cumbria, UK
