An Trinse sets a swirling soundscape of hypnotic drones, toppling synthesis and double bass, courtesy of Maxwell Sterling, versus stroboscopic pieces of 3D makings of ancient websites, rough, monochromatic fractals stamped with ancient glyphs and ancient, science fiction schematics.
As An Trinse, Northern Irish audiovisual artist Stephen McLaughlin reckons with the cultural history of Ireland with noise and image, mapping what he explains as “the anxious environments and silences left in the Irish mind in the consequences of colonial and spiritual repression, utilizing archaeology and ancient history as a channel.” Of specific interest to McLaughlin are bog fossils, particularly, the unbelievable preservative impacts that the anaerobic environment of bogs can have in relation to natural tannic acids that outcome from the natural degrading of peat moss. “Bogs themselves include a special environment totallyfree of oxygen which avoids the development of germs which would generally disintegrate flesh,” discusses McLaughlin. “In their location are a types which deteriorates peat moss to type humic acid, which acts as a natural embalming environment comparable to the procedure utilized when tanning leather.” This procedure can outcome in the best conditions for conservation, with ancient artefacts consistingof bog wood, barrels of bog butter, whole farming landscapes covered by blanket bogs and bog bodies, with skin, hair and internal organs undamaged, havingactually been discovered in unbelievable condition up to 5000 years after they were immersed in the wetlands. “There is a basic secret surrounding these artefacts,” continues McLaughlin, “and it is unidentified whether the bodies were the outcome of human sacrifice, a penalty for a criminaloffense deserving of pity or honour, however they haveactually mesmerized artists and thinkers as varied and Joseph Beuys, Seamus Heaney, Sigmund Freud and Karl Jung whose fight over the significance of these bodies inspired my earlier work, Corpses From the North. “They emerge as what Karin Sanders calls: ‘corporeal time pills that transcend archaeology to obstacle our presumptions about what we understand about the past. By bringback them to the lineup of cultural phenomena that force us to face our ethical and visual limits…excavates onceagain the concern of what it suggests to be human.’”
It is within this frame that An Trinse checksout Ireland’s violent history of colonial and spiritual injustice, integrating iconography and the fossilised ancient culture of Ireland into his abstract excavations of cultural memory. It was throughout researchstudy finished as part of a partnership with Sardinian artist Il Santo Bevitore, the verysame cooperation that served as the beginning point for the above audiovisual work, that McLaughlin made the discovery that some of the earliest human stays discovered in present day Northern Ireland, which date back about 5000 years, share close ancestral familymembers with native Sardinians. “It is difficult for the historical creativity not to run with this,” continues McLaughlin, “given the comparable misconceptions of giants, megalithic buildingandconstructions and the concentric rings that run through both cultures’ artwork, which hasactually been discovered as far away as the USA, and envision there was some ancient network running inbetween these cultures. Maybe it was just through the sluggish procedure of cultural transfer, however maybe a more magical innovation.” It’s these twin trick histories of ancient innovation that McLaughlin checksout in Humic Acid Regress, setting a swirling soundscape of hypnotic drones, toppling synthesis, passages of exceptional environment and double bass, courtesy of Maxwell Sterling, versus stroboscopic pieces of 3D makings of ancient websites, rough, monochromatic fractals stamped with ancient glyphs and science fiction schematics. Mechanised, filtered video of deserted human settlements, as though plucked from an archive for extraterrestrial researchstudy, is superimposed with a self-generating, natural user userinterface, as though the artist has recuperated the advanced interactions innovation of a lost civilisation from unidentified depths, leaking with bog acid.
Ordnance study maps of interstitial areas appear to plot a lost megalithic network, while the overlay of an adjoined matrix of golden transmitters gestures towards the kinds of innovation now lost to these ancient civilisations drowned in soil and moss. In this collage of images, McLaughlin looksfor to trace an alternate history of these mystical websites, establishing a multidisciplinary practice he explains as “based on researchstudy carriedout looking into connections inbetween ancient civilisations and the speculative history of a international ancient society with sophisticated production innovation that was damaged by some kind of apocalyptic occasion leaving coupleof hints to their origin. There is something specifically bothering here, deep in the Anthropocene, where indications of social and environmental collapse appear to loom.” What McLaughlin impacts, then, is a kind of audiovisual time travel, in which his non-linear representation of a speculative ancient history creates a area in which concealed pasts bleed into lost futures, a idea he raises from the works of The Teardrop Explodes frontman and Neolithic authority Julian Cope. “Another impact was Julian Cope’s ‘Time-shifting Gnostic Hooligan Road Novel,’ One Three One, where a psychedelic tourist discovers a method to journey to ancient Sardinia through enormous dosages of hallucinogens,” states McLaughlin. “Over the last 30 years Cope hasactually endedupbeing an specialist on the megaliths and ancients of European prehistory and hasactually released anumberof extremely desired books on the topic that point towards a complex and magical society that,