Cabinet of ideas and future visions (cash converters)

‘Cabinet of ideas and future visions (cash converters)’ is from the ambitious installation ‘Nervous sleep’, made for the 2009 Anne Landa award exhibition. This installation explored altered states such as hypnosis, group therapy, brainwashing, LSD experiences, trance and sleepwalking.

This large and heavy cabinet balances delicately on a wheel rim and stack of CD and Laserdisc players. It is filled with old monitors playing DVDs, which refer to such pop culture topics as lookalikes impersonating film stars and the mass marketing of the supernatural. It also contains redundant technology including cassette players, a sculpture of Moore made by a blind woman from a verbal description of the artist's appearance given over the phone, a skull, Halloween masks and a medicine ball. This pop culture assemblage, in common with many of Moore’s works, articulates a sense of dislocation and anxiety occasioned by media culture and disposable urban life.

A sense of an anxious masculinity also permeated this installation. The video cabinet, the mobile made from drummers cymbals, the mirror ball, the sounds of a bong gurgling and the self-portrait on acid – were all components which contributed to a sense of being in a fantasy teenage males bedroom. This project embodied an arrested development where masculinity has no path to maturity in a world which can seem to no longer value traditional masculine attributes or offer a viable alternative identity to young men. Retreating into drugs, impersonation or dream-like states are all ways to cope with alienation, though their long term efficacy is dubious.