Ian Wolter

La Conoscenza

The Knowledge

The Knowledge appears to be a traitional game-show, perhaps from the 1980s. Its highlight though, a race across London between an traditional black cab and a smart phone equipped uber cab, betrays it as a contemporary creation. Its enthusiastic host, Robert O'reilly, describes this as an 'epic, existential battle, a battle for survival and the future of mankind..'  Its familiar game-show conventions and unchallenging narrative urge us to watch it as pulp TV, but the show is curiously hollow with neither theme music nor applause. 

https://vimeo.com/219233972 - Password:  Luxembourg

In the game-show setting of The Knowlege Ian Wolter emphasises the seemingly unconcerning popular belief that rapidly advancing technologies will sweep aside the Knowledge (the unique test that London cab drivers must pass) as well as both cab and uber drivers as well as numerous other jobs. Our sentimental desire to preserve the unpreservable is also brought to the fore.

SHORT BIOGRAPHY OF THE ARTIST

The winner of the Arte Laguna Prize 2016 and the Global Sustainability Art Prize 2015. He creates kinetic sculpture, performances and films as a means to explore societal trends and possible futures. He uses a broad range of media and approaches and he enjoys collaborating, this keeps his practice exciting. He aims for his art to be accessible and to foster debate, to be easily argued over. He is fascinated by Jaques Rancière’s idea that the power of political art doesn’t lie in the tension between the art and its inherant politics, but in the tension between it being simultaneously art and non-art. Art may be infected with non-art and become both more powerful and less valuable. A graduate of Cambridge School of Art (Fine Art) 2015

FROM THE SAME ARTIST

The Ectoplasm of Self Delusion