‘Clamshell Garage,’ a collaborative video work by Archie Taylor and Charlie Osborne, featuring digital characters designed by Gulliver Whitby, is premiering online via AQNB today. Originally screened at London’s Waiting Room Film Festival on February 25, the work “follows a speculative instrument and its keeper, a glass harp singing in a pixelated paper place.”
Surrounded by an assemblage of 21st century pop detritus — an old Nokia dumbphone, figurines, emojis, and Elf Bar vape pens — animations dance across the harp while activated by the performer, who sits wearing novelty LED-soled trainers. Voiceover narration reads poetry set to a soundtrack of warped bleeps and cut up vocal samples. With lines like “she had traded the old brick for a new Blackberry, warnings read ‘beware of the fruit!’ But she’s already sucked in,” the work creates a surreal environment among the junk and phone-mediated strangeness of today.**
