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The Milan Machinima Festival is delighted to introduce Brenton Alexander Smith's The Impossibility of Things Disappearing. Featured in The Neo Avant-garde program, Smith's work will be available between March 19-26 2023 exclusively on the MMF website.
His previous machinima Things Are Different Now, was featured in 2020 as part of VRAL. Read an interview by Luca Miranda here.
Brenton Alexander Smith is an Australian artist whose work delves into the intricate interplay between humanity and technology. He creates pieces that evoke a range of emotions, from discomfort to nostalgia, and draws on a variety of media, both digital and tangible, to craft immersive installations that feature both sculptural and video components. One of Smith’s primary concerns is addressing the cultural anxieties that arise from our dependence on technology. His work reflects this by imbuing machine detritus with human-like qualities and expressions. The result is a thought-provoking commentary on our relationship with technology and the role it plays in shaping our lives. Smith earned a Master’s degree in Fine Arts from the University of NSW in Australia in 2020, and his work has been exhibited internationally, as well as in his hometown of Sydney. His solo exhibitions include I Feel Like a Nervous Wreck (2019) at the virtual gallery of Closed on Monday Gallery and Together with Machines (2015) at the Akureyri Art Museum in Iceland. He has also participated in The Wrong Biennale (2019) in Valencia, Spain, and received the Friedman Foundation Travelling Scholarship in 2014.
In the following interview, Brenton Alexander Smith discusses the main inspirations behind his new artwork:
Matteo Bittanti: The impossibility of things disappearing is a captivating exploration of the intersection between life and death, and the notion of agency beyond the living. Can you speak to the inspiration behind this work, and how you approached creating a sense of liveliness and movement in a desiccated fish?
Brenton Alexander Smith: This work started as a technical challenge that I set for myself. I’ve worked with BeamNg.drivebefore to make similar kinds of videos but it was always within the constraints of the car theme of the game. I would use mods that other people have created to open up new ways of making, but the subject matter always began with a car. I wanted to see if I could put something else into the simulation to see how it would behave. I set about learning how to make my own mod for the game.
The idea was to replace the car with something different, perhaps something organic. I decided to go with the desiccated fish because it was part of an old video artwork I made during a residency in Iceland that I had been meaning to expand on. It was a video of a factory machine that packaged fish to be sent to Nigeria to be used as soup stock. I took a screenshot from the video and selected one of the dried fish from the image to be turned into a 3D object.
I think about the work in terms of resurrection. The original fish has surely been turned into soup by now, but here we see its specter rotating on screen. This is partly what I’m getting at with the title of the work. Matter doesn’t disappear, it can only become something new. In the same way images (like the fish) can be reused, reinterpreted and resurrected.
Matteo Bittanti: BeamNG.drive was designed to simulate the experience of driving with “realistic” physics. By using it to create an artwork, you subverted its intended purpose, well beyond your previous works. Can you address the role of BeamNG.drive in the creation of this piece, and how the simulation’s realistic physics affected the final product? Also, can you describe the process of creating the mod and how it enabled you to use the game’s physics simulation as an “animation” technique? Is this the first installment of a new series, à la The Soft Crash (2020)?
Matteo Bittanti
Works cited
Brenton Alexander Smith
The Impossibility of Things Disappearing
digital video/machinima, color, sound, 6’ 10”, 2022, Australia
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