Nicholas John Hacon Palfrey

In this body of work, I have been exploring the grey area that exists between the two terms ‘history’ and ‘myth’ ontologically. Crossed with this, I am looking into the idea of ‘the digital’ and how it may effect the telling of histories in the future. With the ‘wealth’ of contemporary thought and opinion existing in the digital sphere, plus the invention of things such as synthetic imaging – images and bots that create pointed, politically opinionated content designed to influence audiences – I am looking to draw a Hegelian-esque dialectic between the myth of King Arthur and the condition we as consumers of content currently find ourselves in. I am concerned by the way that, with the death of print media and our ever-increasing reliance on digital media to chronicle our history, our histories will share a similar fate to the chronicling – or lack thereof – of the fourth to sixth centuries in Britain: albeit in the inverse. Conversely, if this doesn’t happen, we will present future generations with a chaotic, overly saturated account of our times, totally incoherent and full of misinformation. The work I am making is a critique of our condition utilising Speculative Realist and Object Orientated ideas as the basis for the development of the work.