Video Artist Benedict Drew Talks 'Mainland Rock,' Escaping Hallucinatory Information Overload

Through June, video artist Benedict Drew exhibited his mind-melting audio-visual installation Mainland Rock. A multi-chapter work, the installation took over an entire room at the Jerwood Space in London, creating a claustrophobic atmosphere of techno-induced, hallucinatory information overload.

Drew, who is currently in the process of bringing Mainland Rock to other galleries, couldn't make the video available online. But, he did give us several clips and still images from the installation, and took some time to talk about his background in audio-visual installations, the process of making Mainland Rock, and his ambitious plan to use Focal Point Gallery's gigantic outdoor LED screen for an installation, subverting their ubiquitous "hyper-saturated bright materiality."

While the computer is integral to Drew's work, the intention is for the work to look handmade, as though it were stuck together with sellotape and glue.

"My process is kind of shonky," Drew said. "Computers never work in this slick, seamless way that they are meant to. There are thousands of crashes and layering and switching between software, trying to work with badly shot footage."

"And the sculptures that are often in the exhibitions are lumpen and a bit unskilled, so the process is a bit chaotic and improvised," he added.

Drew's original background was in music. While studying for his bachelor's degree at art school in the late '90s, he was exposed to noise and improvised music, the latter of which is quite prominent in London. When Drew dove into musical improvisations, it was with a laptop. He also worked for a time in the mid-'00s for the London Musicians Collective, producing festivals and concerts.

At a certain point, though, he wanted to work with things other than pure sound. That led him into the land of artistic exhibitions.

For his audio-visual installation Heads May Roll (2014), for instance, Drew examined the "effect and intent of mediated images, synthesized voice and the fractured narrative of instructional speech." It featured a science fiction stage set comprised of a landscape of objects, projected images, and electronic sound. As with much of his work, it was immersive, sculptural, and psychedelic. The Onesie Cycle (2013), which can be see below, also featured a variety of dark and surreal sculptural and projected elements.

Mainland Rock grew out of Drew's time at a residency at the University of Canterbury at Christchurch, New Zealand. "I was there for maybe a month and made an exhibition called Zero Hour Petrified," he said. "That was at the beginning of the residency, and then I made Mainland Rock."

The first chapter, introduced by the words "Architecture of the Man," digs into authority's use of buildings to enforce order and sense of alienation. Drew said that he was told the University of Canterbury's buildings were constructed after student uprisings. This is type of order that Guy Debord and the Situationists tried to blow wide open with the [psychogeographical derive](http:// http://www.geog.leeds.ac.uk/people/a.evans/psychogeog.html), where one weaves through cities and around buildings in an attempt to reclaim them from power structures.

As Drew noted, the University of Canterbury had a "brutalist design" meant to break up protests.

"I was looking at this architecture not as a couple of pieces of mid-century design, but something designed and intended to disrupt protest," he said. "It becomes this malicious thing with a purpose. I was interested in how it could be active in that way, and how it took on an alienating aspect."

In Mainland Rock, Drew's camera lingers on a number of the university's objects and landscapes, but most especially trees. He said that there is this notion that the trees are the embodiment of the '60s counterculture, the only things that survived the brutalist regime.

Drew's audio fuses atonal and nearly-industrial rhythmic music with what sound like menacing broadcasts from some unseen Orwellian power. Another voice cuts through the dense field of sound: Drew's words spoken by a female voice. This voice says, "I have become transmogrified," by which he acknowledges that his voice has taken the form of a mysterious and almost electronically-toned female narrator.

The decision to give his voice to a (faceless) female was, he said, inspired by the Greek myth of Tiresias. This ancient story describes the blind and clairvoyant Greek prophet's transformation into a woman for seven years. As an oracle, he is known for telling the truth about past, present, and future events.

In Mainland Rock, various 3D animations, hand-drawn onto a computer, float in psychedelic fashion across the screen. Imagine David Lynch directing an Adult Swim series, and you'll get the idea of what Drew is up to with the installation. These images, along with the audio, crescendo to the point of information overload. Eventually, the viewer is given a breather, literally, as an amorphous animated shape oscillates to the rhythm of a human's breathing.

This serves as the transition into the second chapter, which is set in a library. Drew said that this chapter examines the notion that a library could be a "site of horror for the dyslexic."

"There is this idea of looking at things very singularly," he said. "And maybe this chapters says something about dyslexia and the weight of knowledge that a library holds being a horror and a daunting form of oppression."

To that end, a page of text digitally warps and bleeds amidst harsh, synthetic industrial noise. Drew then moves the camera through the library's stacks amidst this noise, generating a horror show of sorts through a red filter. As he said, these shots are heavily processed.

"One of the things I did was take this incredibly shaky camera, which is quite sensitive, and run the footage through the SmoothCam Filter in Final Cut Pro," he explained. "It tries desperately to make the shaky footage into a smooth motion, so it really freaks out. It was overcompensating, and I was trying to push that image."

Drew also used Final Cut Pro and After Effects to render other library footage in psychedelically iridescent ways. It's as if the dyslexic person has moved beyond this overbearing atmosphere into a pure state of hallucination: something almost beautiful despite the horror.

From there, the video moves into a section that features a substance hanging in a state somewhere between liquid and slime, before turning into a rock.

"There's a line that says we were old slime once, and now we might be a mixture of slime and rock, which relates to the body containing calcium and this gooey stuff," said Drew. "It moves into this section of landscapes with these giant limestone boulders, which relate to a sort of manifestation of desire."

The slimy admixture, Drew said, was made out of expanding foam mixed with paint. As a material, it hardens. Drew shot it when it was hanging in an in-between or transitional state, before moving to the shots of giant limestone boulders.

As a whole, Drew said Mainland Rock is meant to be "shoegazy." He composed the soundtrack himself, and emphasized that it's integral to the whole audio-visual experience. Drew generates sounds and music first to set a tone or vibe, then moves onto video elements.

"There is a single rhythm and BPM that runs through it, but heavily processed through tape compression," he said. "The voice-over is mixed quite low, so it kind of sounds like My Bloody Valentine, and it's mean to be kind of dizzy."

"I went back to see the installation recently and someone was lying down on the bench," he added. "I thought, 'It's producing the effect that I was after.'" A hypnogogic feeling that puts the viewers into a sort of techno-induced trance.

"There is this idea within the work to effect the body, so when using these techniques like stroboscopic visuals, it kind of leaps out of the screen," Drew said. "It's disorientating and psychedelic, I suppose."

"If you walk through a Westfield shopping center, it's enough to make you want to pass out," he said. "It's very dystopian, really, because all of this stuff is there to sell shoes that are made by terribly-paid workers on the other side of the world. It's the psychedelic peak of capitalism."

"We're surrounded by the state of the screen, and our relationship to it is psychedelic and disorientating, and I'm interested in that potential," he added, noting that he likes to work with rooms as overwhelming, maximalist environments.

"As Stuart Lee said, there is just so much of everything, and I'm interested in how things hit you," Drew mused. "How bass or sub-bass works, or how a flickering light can induce visions, how different tones can produce aural hallucinations, and how these things can induce other states."

Drew believes that this is rooted in politics. The world, so often terrible, is one he often wants to get out of it. "I want to escape, really," he said. "And the drugs don't work anymore."

Drew looks to figures like jazz composer and "cosmic philosopher" Sun-Ra for inspiration, an artist through which fiction and fantasy are mobilized as a form of protest. He admires how Sun-Ra claimed he was from Saturn and built a mythology around it, one that was rooted in the horror of the African American experience set against the American and Russian space race.

"Whities on the moon? Fuck it, it doesn't matter, 'cause I'm from Saturn," said Drew, invoking Sun-Ra's visionary state of mind. "This is how fiction and fantasy can function as a model, and it's very interesting. And it seems to be a kind of product rooted in despair."

For the Focal Point Gallery show in Essex, Drew will be making use of a large outdoor LED screen next to the gallery. He couldn't go into the specifics, but the exterior environment is pushing him into some unfamiliar artistic areas.

"The work is usually about creating intimacies and effect through sound and vision, and using all of that stuff in a close way," he said. "So, it's really odd to make something that is large and outdoors. It's completely new for me."

"Going back to this technological overload, it's about using the apparatus of the large LED and incredibly bright screens—they're everywhere," he added. "You go to a shopping center and they're there. They're the apparatus of everything: commerce, advertising, etc. They have a hyper-saturated bright materiality to them. So, the work is riffing off of that to become this fucked-up public service announcement."