‘Imagine What We Can Do Tomorrow’ at Division of Labour Gallery Salford

Harpreet Kaur

‘Imagine what we can do tomorrow’ is a solo exhibition by digital artist Duncan Poulton, designed to relive and reimagine the dawn of the 21st century. It includes a series of digital collages displayed on all four walls of an enclosed space, with a large TV screen on the floor showing video footage of a new piece of work entitled Y2K, that Poulton has made with artist Nick Smith. Writer and consultant Harpreet Kaur visited the exhibition and has reviewed the show, at Division of Labour Gallery, Salford until 15 July 2023, following an interview with Duncan Poulton about the process and intention involved in making the work.  

I’ve visited Paradise Works studio co-operative space previously, but not this ground floor section. There is a box of blue disposable shoe covers next to the entrance. Putting them on before entering, there’s a heightened feeling of curiosity and intrigue, some suspense just before going inside. They also remind me of Covid, the anxiety associated with disease, contamination and fear. The immersive installation is contained in a gallery lined in aluminium foil, rendering the room a no-signal, Wi-Fi-free zone. It’s shiny, space-like, and reminds me of a film set for a futuristic music video from back in the 1980s and 90s.

The other visitor here to see the work and I take a seat each on the two black bean bags and put on the audio headsets to watch Y2K. The film draws on the artists’ respective archives; home video recordings, news clips and early internet ephemera edited into a video essay in two halves: pre and post Millennium. It conveys the artists’ shared interest in the Millennium as a significant cultural landmark and a turning point that arguably marked the beginning and end of what had been considered ‘the future’ for the duration of the twentieth century.

Smith and Poulton met in London at the LUX Critical Forum in 2018, where they worked together on collages, publications and exhibitions and got together to see shows. They were both invited by TACO! (Thamesmead Arts and Culture Office) in London to curate a screening that led them to spend two or three months experimenting and sifting through archive material. They both investigated the theme of the Millennium but gathered footage separately. Smith, coming from Liverpool, has documented a body of material relating to the northwest from the 1980s and 1990s. Poulton, thirty and growing up in Birmingham, is a decade younger and has a different experience and memory of the Millennium. Visiting the exhibition with friends, family or peers could be really interesting, as the development of social media, technology and its impact on lifestyle in contemporary society may mean different things depending on one’s age and background.  

As a seminal moment of global collective anxiety, New Year’s Eve 1999 is particularly timely to look back on in 2023, from our vantage point amidst the current furore of fear and speculation around exponentially accelerating Artificial Intelligence. This exhibition pinpoints the Millennium as a key moment in considering “How did we get here?” and invites audiences to consider an alternative past in which the Y2K problem (or Millennium Bug) did cause a cataclysm. If this were to have happened, would we still have sleepwalked into our hyperconnected, techno-reliant present? The fear created or imminent at that time led to a global effort to reduce the predicted impact of systems-crashing chaos. I question if as a society we are always in a state of fear, as seems to be the case with any kind of ‘progress’ in technological advancement.

The collages by Poulton are related to the same theme and bear witness to the mental and physical toll taken on a generation that has grown up online – the anxiety, insomnia, apathy and confusion that our post-Millennium tech-led culture has caused. In an interview with Poulton he tells me that he has collected over 30,000 images since 2015. His digital archive is largely made up of material that has been uploaded then forgotten about, deemed irrelevant by search algorithms. The collages are intended to evoke a mood. Poulton explores the subconscious mind through a process of selecting images that combines filtering and decision-making scattered with happy accidents that arise in juxtaposed pairings when least expected.

I am drawn to Sleep Today, a work that looks like graffiti on a garage door featuring sheepish eyes and a pair of hands holding the framed imagery. There are some mummies dotted about at the bottom. It’s a little dark and eerie. Perhaps this is why I like it. My conversation with Poulton reveals that it’s an iPhone photo taken of graffiti observed on a London street. He questions why this word appears as bus stop graffiti, as if the city itself needed a rest. Duncan himself suffered with insomnia for a long time, something that he believes has been normalised in the last decade, and he explores the extent to which screen addiction has an effect on this. Insomnia is a physical ramification of the lifestyle we live. The bulbous eyes and congregation of mummies in the image are taken from the same book on how to make creative school displays, found in a charity shop. He has an appreciation for amateur image making - signs, posters, display boards, scrapbooks, eBay photography - which are combined in complex intermingling layers in these collages. The hands are his own, implicating himself as a co-author of the work. This incorporation of his own body, personal memories and family photos is a new development for him, and one which recurs throughout the exhibition.

I can certainly relate to that as an avid social media user with my phone. It has replaced my laptop that I previously would have pored over for hours. I didn’t sleep properly for years. Was insomnia as rife pre-millennium I wonder? Has tech increased sleep deprivation and anxiety or simply replaced and/or added to the other main concerns that keep us lying awake at night?

I want to know more about Capitalism II. It’s the title that piques my interest. Unbeknown to me it’s the name of a video game. During lockdown Poulton was remembering games he played as a child, and this was one of them. He has downloaded many small icons and scattered them across the surface of the collage. They are not obvious until you examine the collage closely. For Poulton, these represent video game cursors, as if multiple users were constantly re-editing what we see. The zebra skin is taken from an eBay listing. Many photos are taken for use online for a purpose, then no one looks at them again. I don’t think I would have extracted this from the collages without discussing the artist’s process and interests with them. We can make assumptions from titles, but words may carry a range of meanings for different age groups, audiences, and cultural references can get lost between the artist and the audience. The importance of how much is lost or changed could be of little or a lot of importance to artist and audience alike. In my case I want to know what Poulton is trying to convey.

Poulton explains that although this happened 23 years ago and seems like an archival moment, 2000 still feels futuristic enough to be a moment of history that can be explored as a case study of collective anxiety and technology. There is humour in the video as there is on the internet: harrowing material and ‘silly stuff’ side by side. In parts of the film, home movie recordings at a New Year’s Eve 1999 party see people giving predictions of the future of society, technology and progress, which are invariably wrong. While we see the funny side, it also shows the folly of our ability to see what’s coming. Since 2000, power has been democratised through social media as people can make and share their lives and views, make visible our memories and connections. Now, Artificial Intelligence is increasingly able to complete tasks traditionally done by people, a scenario that causes some degree of society anxiety that humans will be replaced by machines without their consent. I ask Poulton if art and culture cause fear and what the role of art could or should be. He says:

“It is not the role of the artist to give a positive image of things, that happens everywhere else in abundance. It’s more our job to think critically of what is happening… looking at moments from our recent history, like Y2K, can help us think about the present moment with more clarity. We can begin to see what changes might have delivered us into the chaotic present.”

Y2K explores the idea that caused panic and fear at the time, that there could have been a bug affecting trains and planes and other crucial infrastructures. However, it did not happen so everything should be fine… but is it? Are we reliving this moment and how would it have changed things if there had been an alternative effect? Should we trust technology? How do people adapt to change and relate to it? These are just some of the questions ‘Imagine What We Can Do Tomorrow’ poses.

The subject matter explored in the collages and video material is often dark and could easily lead one down a dystopian road to misery. The growing loneliness epidemic, lack of connection, fear of technology, hype. But there is also optimism, hope and nostalgia for what once was. These are all interpretations and reflections that may be had on seeing the work. The story you want to tell about the world and the exhibition, based on the plethora of information we now have access to as inferred by the artists, as well as our lives outside of the gallery, is up to you.