Ed Florance

Human Bath

Ed Florance's work sits somewhere between dreamy and nightmarish. Utilising increasingly familiar 3d animation software he depicts fictional mundane objects and settings with a clinical unfriendliness. Slowly pulling you in or making you orbit at arms-length, the videos lull you into their surreal settings and deliver an unending suspense, as if waiting for the jump scene in a horror movie, you are locked into your gaze. It is in this state of suspense that Florance's work operates, forcing expectations and the construction of narratives that never come to fruition. Successfully playing on the notions of 'Faith in Fakes' he questions the expanding domain of the digital and it's capacity to render real experience, however uncomfortable. 

Ed Florance describes his work in Living in Hyperreality: 

‘Human Bath’ depicts a digital non-place, where a character is stuck anticipating endlessly. The animation features props found on the internet, arranged in such away which is seemingly plausible, yet improbable in the real world. Through the use of physically-based computer rendering techniques, an odd event is constructed, where the distinction between reality and computer generation is blurred. We might insist that we either do or don’t like the reality of being part of a computer-driven culture, but have we really communicated anything meaningful about how the basic fact of being inside that world impacts on our ability to say something about it? Is it even viable to compare our world with its non-technological mirror-image? If not, the question becomes “How can we identify ourselves if our lives unfold completely fenced in by a computational machine?”

Ed Florance