Project
by Chad Rossouw
Crossing: Christo Doherty's Small Worlds
In 1983 William Gibson wrote Neuromancer, the book credited with inventing virtual reality and the term 'cyberspace', concepts which have largely, though in a vastly different way, come to be relevant in contemporary life. Curiously, in at least two of his later novels which have similar themes, he uses art objects as the Macguffin (in the Hitchcock sense) to drive his plots, partly because they are an unsolveable mystery around which the characters wrap themselves, and partly because art objects make an appropriate metaphor for virtual reality. Art can be immersive, complex, unfathomable, programmed and social, and as such, tie in perfectly with the aims of the novel.
In a recent show at the Substation Gallery at Wits, called 'Small Worlds' Christo Doherty investigated this metaphor, although from a different direction. He looks to the past, as opposed to a speculative future, to try and shed light on the idea of virtual worlds. In this instance he photographs the obsessive worlds created by model train enthusiasts living in South Africa and representing its landscapes. Somewhat appropriately, my investigation of his show took place wholly online, through entries on a blog, where he writes an interesting and poetic account of the work and via his Flickr set. These two sites are examples of contemporary virtual reality where one builds up an online 'presence' and conducts social interactions.
The work however refuses to be stuck as metaphor, and the investigation of the virtual becomes only one aspect of it, the rest being filled with a strange mix of the landscapes themselves and the personality traces of the characters who built them. Like all virtual worlds it is the content of them that strikes one, not the shell. In these intimate photographs of the small and intricate sets, a nostalgia is apparent. Due to our country's inescapable history a longing for the past inevitably takes on a political meaning, out of place in the hobbyists' enthusiasm but nevertheless prevalent.
Normally, representations of the landscape in this country either take on idealised forms free of human presence or the stark brutality of a Goldblatt print. In the train sets, the representation is an idealised industrial one sitting between the two representations. It has the starkness of industrial South Africa and its implications of apartheid labour while at the same time a wistful sincere longing for the golden age of the railroad.
It returns then to the use of virtual worlds, which we would like to think of as a force for a unifying technotopia, but are in fact the partisan projections of niche social groups.
