“Something that feels like vision but does something your eyes could never do.” The voiceover of Z = |Z/Z•Z-1 mod 2|-1 (2019) seems to provide the best key to understanding “Lavender Town Syndrome,” Andrew Norman Wilson’s solo exhibition at Ordet, Milan. The Californian artist’s multi-channel video installation dominates the exhibition space, leading viewers into immersive and uncanny universes that challenge their sense of reality. Aspects of the installation run in parallel on a diegetic and formal level, producing complex stratifications of meaning.
The artist’s voice guides us through a flow of visions, hybridizing personal memories with social, aesthetic, and metaphysical considerations. The architecture of Marina City, Chicago, and a childhood passion for Pokémon are juxtaposed with theoretical speculations: What happens inside of a Poké Ball, where matter is converted into energy? What remains of bodies, space, and form itself in a condition of absolute virtuality?
Such questions are engaged on a formal level in the work; dematerialization takes the form of a technological switch — occurring on three screens of the installation — from traditional telephoto lens to “physically based renderings” (PBR) of materials, eventually reaching “limitless” images that are procedurally generated using fractal software.
As the artist continues with his spoken-word reflections, the viewer is enchanted by a series of mesmerizing landscapes. This theoretical framework is enhanced by epiphanies realized in the exhibition design: the physical presence of natural fractal patterns — a display of broccoli for example — suggests mysterious relationships between natural immediacy and technological hypermediacy. Different layers of reality overlap; the borders of the real become blurred.
A deep sense of uncanny seems to emerge as an underlying theme of Wilson’s imagery, as do simultaneous impressions of attraction and dismay. A papier-mâché replica of a Pikachu meme (Pikachu, 2019) provides a disturbing, gravity-defying figure — a Frankenstein of meaning produced by an incestuous merging of virtual and real.
What’s left of human nature in these spaceless worlds, and how does it relate to our existence? As we ponder such questions, the “Lavender Town Tone” — a Pokémon music theme reputedly responsible for causing several Japanese children to commit suicide — starts playing. Wilson is not providing answers, but instead framing a question we can no longer avoid.
