The Response-Hive city was originally created for the online exhibition called “History of the Future”, a project conceived by curators Jasmina Karabeg and Jennifer Pickering.
The exhibition included works by Chris Bose, Jeremy Turner, Mariel Belanger, Bracken Hanuse Corlett, Cease Wyss, Pudy Tong, Judy Cheung & Brian Gotro.
This is the excerpt from their exhibition essay about the piece:
“Jude Norris proposes a new philosophy of history with new historical agents, directions
and decisions. In “The Response – Hive City”, history is considered not only in temporal,
but also in spatial terms. The movement of history ceases to be an unidirectional, linear
process unfolding in time. Spatialised, history becomes a landscape.
The viewers choose paths prompted by their own intuition, curiosity and emotion. The
process is infinitely more complex, as moving through the space of Jude Norris’s
landscapes is also the process of their remaking. The interplay of black and white with
coloured elements brings up both the historical language of early coloured photography
and the most recent language of comics and movies. Along with Norris’s descriptions of
elements in a particular world this visual language facilitates our travels. The worlds of
the Hive City are held together by billboards that are found in each one of the
landscapes. These billboards are similar in the way faces of family members are similar
–recognizable yet never identical.
Our movement, marked by its particular spirituality and desire, undoes the reductive
notion of rational, self-serving agents, which figured in economic theories since Adam
Smith and have only recently being called into question. Along with the new philosophy
of history Norris invites us to consider the possibilities of new economies that keep the
complexity of its original Greek etymology as care of the home and care for the
inhabitants of the home. These economies encompass aesthetic, spiritual and historical
values, which are upheld for their own importance rather than for their monetary
equivalent. Present day western democracies and their economic systems claim their
roots in the traditions of ancient Greeks. Yet “Response – Hive City” demonstrates how
impoverished this notion of economy has become. Coming from within First Nations’ set
of values Norris argues against this reduction.
Moving through these landscapes does not happen only as a result of the viewers’ will.
The objects implanted in the landscape are immediate and necessary vehicles of
movement and become equal agents in the construction of these worlds. Each object is
an event in itself. In one landscape they completely remake us and the world whereas in
another they return us to the starting point. We do not fully understand their operation.
What kind of unpredictable possibilities does an object like a genetically engineered
tobacco plant harbour? The limited intelligibility of objects brings up the question of
responsibility and agency in the unfolding of the future. Do we know the repercussions
of our creations? Is the social and economical imagination a renewable resource or has
it run dry?”
~ Jasmina Karabeg and Jennifer Pickering