• photo of a video screen showing a picture of a colourful egg on wheels

Baden Pailthorpe

Incubator

2017
high definition 3D animation, infinite loop
9:16

UTS Art Collection
Accession number: UTS2017.006

Located in the UTS Central Building
Building 2, Level 5
(CB02.05)


“As a media artist, I’ve always been interested in the history of the technologies I use to make artworks. Most of these have some basis in the military, including the most ubiquitous tools we use every day—screens, GPS, the Internet. At the same time, the world seems to becoming increasingly militarised, not only through international conflicts, but also in domestic spaces.” [1]

Baden Pailthorpe is an Australian artist whose videos and installations explore the history, politics and cultures of technology. His artworks have taken as their subject sport, finance, contemporary art, militarism and their associated technologies, aesthetics and politics.

Pailthorpe often uses the very technologies he seeks to critique in the realisation of his artworks. The 3D animation Incubator is part of a series of artworks in which Pailthorpe registered a real AI-driven start-up company, Petricore Pty Ltd, whose services included a fantasy ‘art league’ where the careers of elite artists were gamified for profit. Incubator was conceived as a piece of visual merchandise to promote the services of Petricore Pty Ltd. In the video, a translucent egg gestates infinitely under a heat lamp. The saturated colours and the infinite slow loop create a surreal setting for the artist’s satirical critique of start-up culture and the effects of late capitalism on creative and conceptual practice.

Baden Pailthorpe completed a Synapse artist residency with UTS Sports and Exercise Science in 2018, the results of which were shown in the exhibition Clanger at UTS Gallery in 2018.

[1] Baden Pailthorpe in Video Game-Inspired Art Comments on Militarism, Ingrid Kesa, https://www.vice.com/en_au/article/3d7zj8/baden-pailthorpe.