Wired

Two men walk into a pub and get some drinks. They sit down at a table and I ask them what's on TV. 'Hey mother, we're not real. You've got your Hyper-Reality helmet on'. I switch on the TV and there I am, reading the news with a smile on my face. I take another PsP tab and the rain comes down for a minute. I get into someone else's car and drive it, steering with my teeth, my anus on the gear stick. My arms are still inside a huge TV set looking for the keys. I pass the muggers and the Polish vodka shop. McCaslin lies on a bed made from 20 blankets and an electric fan blows cold air next to a still American flag. He has cold beers and spliff and I get stoned. I really didn't study at school. Magic mushrooms grew in the fields around the school and me, Didi, Rusty, and Greenwood picked them instead of lessons and took them in sandwiches with Branston pickle. Psychedelics reveal the mystery of life. It's a little jelly baby with fuzzy hair and a habit of flicking ash on yer new kegs. 1

The dystopian urban landscape, incorporating both the high-tech paranoia of the city and the low-rise domesticity of suburbia, is now less the futuristic vision of an apocalyptic prophet than the familiar backdrop to our own particular historical moment. Anxiety, disorder, entropic decay, violence and dehumanisation are rapidly coalescing in the wake of the pervasive global expansion of the new technologies.

Matthew McCaslin's personal journey through this landscape bypasses any heroic confrontation with 'the system'. Accepting the futility and inevitable failure of an oppositional strategy, McCaslin adopts a mode of engagement which stresses integration, rather than conquest: one where the boundary between the self and the world is dissolved, and the body becomes a decentred element in a network of energy exchanges. Yet McCaslin refuses to operate as a passive component in this network; rather he functions in a wilfully mutant manner, disrupting and reorienting the flow of energy into a diverse genus of excrescent forms.

The simplest of these forms are created from the materials of McCaslin's former subsistence occupation - construction. The metal struts of stud walls, electric cable, conduits, lighting fixtures, waste pipes, are brought out from their internal habitats and allowed to breathe freely in the purified air of the gallery. Detached from the restrictions of their familiar roles, these materials assume a superfluous status and build themselves into semi-ornate structures which ignore the logic of their usual applications.

Coils of shiny steel electrical conduit snake across the floor, or writhe in loose contortions, loop lazily, and convolute. Nestling in the coils or dangling, electric lights burn. The conduit gives way to black rubber cable, branching from circuit boxes and connecting the sprawling proto-organisms to the mains supply and into the grid and on and on. Metal stud walls are left stripped bare, supporting only themselves. The detritus of the installation process remains, discarded, shell-like fragments of its becoming.

This base technology is fused with more complex equipment, which combine in environments which are experienced as events - extended, yet limited, repeated moments. Indeed, 'Event'(1993), at the Newburg Gallery, New York, aggressively assaulted the viewer. In the entrance to the gallery, a group of tape cassette machines sat amongst a tangle of cables and plugs, playing back applause. Further inside, a confused tower of PA speakers, entwined in a disordered mess of wires and cables, loudly relayed the recorded sound of an ecstatic, delirious, cheering stadium crowd. The adulation, self-generated and self-appreciatory, made the viewer redundant, an unexpected spectator of an absurd masturbatory display. The neurosis inflicted upon the viewer by these machines was exacerbated by an isolated tape machine relaying the nagging sound of a telephone ringing, frustratingly unanswerable. An outsized ghetto blaster strung to the wall, wrapped in more cable and switches, added the final note to the dissonant aural ambience with the recorded sound of gunfire. Around the gallery a series of TV monitors provided visual distraction, simultaneously showing the same mundane image of cars in constant random motion passing along the New Jersey turnpike, always in peripheral vision.

Elsewhere, McCaslin extends the network of energy exchanges beyond the territory of human technology and connects it into the primal energy field of nature. Fire and wind appear in Walking on Water (1993), though not as romantic elements in a harmonious and benign landscape. Four electric fans swing endlessly back and forth beneath a silent video replay of an immense fire. It burns uncontrollably, destructive and primal, while the contradictory sensation of the cool wind confuses, breaking down the rational distinction between the two separate entities and combining them in a dynamic flux. Over the mute resonance of this flux several different voices, out of synch with each other, repeat a countdown from ten to one. The perpetual arrival of the here and now. Two electric wall clocks confirm the presence of time, though those displayed are arbitrary, dislocating the event from a specific local-temporal co-ordinate and extending the spatial dimension to cosmological proportions. The familiar loops and twists of electric cable, passing through switches and junction boxes, connect between the components, and into the gallery power point and on and on.

Although these synthesised forms clearly approximate the cybernetic characteristics of late capitalism and its attendant technologies, they are not about the techno-social apparatus of 'the system', a reflection on an experience of reality that takes place somewhere else. They exist as autonomous phenomena that evolve from their environment, while the gallery and the occasion of the exhibition provide an opportune situation for their materialisation. Yet McCaslin's interventions do somehow afford us a glimpse of the dimly perceptible enormity of an integrated world system. In experiencing his events we manage partially to reconcile the disparate dimensions of our daily existence and the abstract immensity of the global communications network.