The Weight of Things is a science fiction story about a world like ours that kept producing and hoarding too much information. About how that affected the information that existed first, including the parts that make up DNA. In this world, information is the next new state of matter, after liquids, solids, gases, and plasma. But it’s also a ravenous and invasive thing that tries to take over any space it can find. And it’s heavy. It changes the way that gravity behaves, and it coats everything that stands still long enough with a thick invisible snow. It's something about the way that it accumulates, about how its bits and bytes grow and replicate themselves under enthusiastic care. Like one copy of a cat video turning into a hundred thousand copies in the blink of an eye, or the swipe of a finger on a screen.

  
The Weight of Things is hidden behind a wall of bright colours. It moves like a virus, touching one and then ten and then a hundred and then more. It might be a metaphor. It’s almost certainly a cautionary tale, but it’s definitely a little bit more than a painting, if you blink your eye, or swipe your screen.

  

The Weight of Things

The Arpanet is the first chapter of a trilogy-in-imagination by Tricky Walsh. The title harkens back to the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) of 1966, the early foundation for the internet, which revolved around resource sharing between remote computers. In Tricky’s speculative world, the Arpanet becomes a kaleidoscopic portal that places viewers on the precipice of information overload.

  
The artist’s visual and sculptural works are rooted in their complex and open-ended fictional writings, which are simultaneously interested in and suspicious of both mysticism and scientific reasoning. In this series of gouache paintings, they employ an intuitive grasp of geometry, color, numbers, and intention to deflect the ideals of mathematical conformity and perfection. Instead, they build a raving visual and intertextual world out of myriad layered details, some visible and some hidden, which test our dwindling attention spans.

  
On view here are the first eight fragments of The Arpanet. The complete vision will be completed onsite in April, filling out the Forum wall. Once the work is complete, you can use your phone to access certain layers of Tricky’s descent into chaos through Augmented Reality (AR).

  
The Arpanet is a new site-specific commission for "So it appears" and the ICA Forum.

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