Matthew Cosslett, ‘missing in-crypt tides’ | Online Screening

LUX Scotland is delighted to present an online screening of ​‘missing in-crypt tides’ by Matthew Cosslett.

Matthew received the Margaret Tait Residency in 2022 and spent six weeks at the Pier Arts Centre’s Linkshouse Residency. ​‘missing in-crypt tides’ has grown from research developed while on the residency and was premiered at Glasgow Film Theatre in September 2023.

This online screening will be accompanied by a written response to the work by Nicole Starosielski, Professor in the Department of Film and Media at University of California, Berkeley.

‘missing in-crypt tides’ is a moving image work positioned between Orkney’s cruise ship industry and an underwater data-centre sunk by Microsoft off Orkney’s coast. Compressed between ship and server,​‘missing in-crypt’ tides locates the entirety of the network— user, content, experience, infrastructure— in Orkney, lamenting the shared realities of travel and technology.

Incorporating expanded camera produced content— a tourist marketed superzoom camera, found 360° video, content from TikTok and YouTube, generated imagery—​‘missing in-crypt tides’ extends its eye to track strangers on the move, offering and withdrawing a waterlogged contemporary visual reality, rich with longing and distance.

These perpetual journeys are serenaded by vocaloid Eleanor Forte, who is cruising at-sea, saturated by true crime, TikTok, and technological illness. This voice travels alongside Orcadian folk music and manipulated found sound, blurring lines of priority and emotion between sound and image as they sink to the seabed.

‘missing in-crypt tides’ presents layers of destination-less and de-located travel, floating towards actual and technological death in both ship and server. Underwater,​‘missing in-crypt tides’ eulogistic footage pipelines— slot machines, karaoke, rollercoasters, Orkney’s neolithic history— reproduce their lack of destination laced with unreachable desire.

Building a symbiotic hyper-personal and hyper-detached axis,​‘missing in-crypt tides’ densely weaves together the body’s inhabitation of technology, and the exorcising of technology from the body.​‘missing in-crypt tides’ locates a prism in Orkney, which refracts the camera, us, and the network.

Matthew Cosslett is a Scottish multidisciplinary artist based in Glasgow, who interrogates physical and digital topographies with expanded camera produced content. Moulding digital archives, generated imagery, and shot footage with re-contextualised music and found sound, Matthew explores how we build and embody meaning in dirt and in data.