Overview

Plugging himself into the potential discontent with a society that privileges the present–real time-at the detriment of both the past and the future, Simon Yates folds open a porthole that allows for a direct engagement with the world analogous to the time-space continuum.

In his new project, Universal Cloaking Device, Simon Yates has compressed ten years of art practice-ideas, inventions, machines and philosophy, into a single receptacle which notions toward a practice of art as an informal probing into a world seemingly out of rational control–a space where capitalism triumphs. The velocity with which technology evolves is garnered exponentially and runs parallel with capitalism. Universal Cloaking Device performs as simulacrum to the ‘real’ [world] of materialism–both are spaces underscored by the tenement of time, the former a three dimensional projection of the artist’s mind, the latter a representation of the velocity of technology.

Made from the detritus of contemporary throwaway society, Universal Cloaking Device is a complex imaginative space created via an obsessive discursive practice where the abstract concept is altered into a literal space of processes–a pragmatic method of constructing and presenting, discussing and being. Universal Cloaking Device deals with fundamental questions about ethics and morality, politics and power in the global space of triumphant capitalism-with its voracious war of “all” against “all”.

Yates offers up a direct engagement with the world from a perspective devoid of the structures and concepts that hold court and jury to the present, a mono-political relationship that erases the interstices implicit in difference. Universal Cloaking Device acts as a Möbius strip concurrently folding materialism and technology into the time-space continuum–a cogent signifier of a society folding and collapsing into itself ad infinitum.