![]() “In my mind it can all lead to people betraying themselves, at mercy to the strange ‘adsphere’ we all find ourselves in.” The video sees Prendergast receiving delivery of misshapen ring light, yet, rather than disappoint his followers, he warps the world around him and his own form in order to adapt to the defective technology. “The product worship aspect of the whole thing only adds to the mania”, he continues. “There’s an inherent mania to these kinds of videos, especially the unboxing ones, where the person is trying to keep what is in essence quite a boring activity engaging.” “I’m fascinated by the whole YouTube software tutorial / consumer tech review / unboxing content creation phenomena – It seems to be a kind of marker of where large swathes of the western world is at right now, and I’m really interested in the mechanics of it all,” explains Prendergast. Created by Mark Prendergast, who also narrates the track and stars in the video, Hand Axe follows a YouTube unboxer and tech influencer making content about a uniquely contemporary artefact – the ring light. It’s in this space of online artifice and reality-bending that the warped visual for Hand Axe takes place. This exploration of confused contradiction, the presentation of two possible realities, neither of which seem to have any satisfying consequence, refers back to the original image of the Hydrangea, a plant that blooms either pink or blue depending on the soil it’s grown in, a phenomena which today invokes the deranged spectacle of gender-reveal ceremonies shared on social media. ![]() The album and performance take this title from the infamous PhD thesis of Australian businessman Craig Wright, a computer scientist and businessman, who in 2016 made the spurious claim that he was, in fact, the creator of bitcoin, the mysterious Satoshi Nakamoto. For their follow up, Gnarled Roots, a contraction of the title of the original performance of the work, Hydrangea 2: Gnarled Roots of a Creation Theory, Childs and Žygus follow these threads, mapping out an intricate account of 21st Century mythology, taking the destruction of the Twin Towers on Septemas its origin story. Setting gnomic dialogue, read by collaborators Elif Özbay, Marijn Degenaar and artist Mark Prendergast, against Disney string sections, Ravelian piano impressions and HD sound design inspired by gabber and hardcore, the duo blur the lines between fiction and reality, building a disorienting world in which you’re never quite sure whether you’re listening to post-structuralist theory, a data leak or someone’s desperate attempt to make meaning in a sea of multiplatform noise. ![]() Working together with Metahaven, who created artwork and lyric videos for the album, Childs and Žygus attempted to unpack the “use of contemporary and postmodern artistic strategies to design narrative uncertainty,” as well as the ways that political theorists such as Steve Bannon, Aleksandr Dugin and Vladislav Surkov manipulate and weaponise information to design realities for submission and control. Culminating in an album for James Ginzburg’s Subtext, Hydrangea explored political conspiracy theories, post-internet theories of history, and both artists’ lifelong experiences with rave culture. Artist Mark Prendergast stars as a YouTube unboxer and tech influencer who warps reality around a misshapen ring light.īack in 2020 writer and artist Holly Childs collaborated with composer and sound artist Gediminas Žygus on a series of works entitled Hydrangea. ![]()
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