Mummy Hood Nesting Forest (still), David Steans (2022).
DATES: Launching Monday 7 November 2022, 9:00am
WHERE: www.mummyhoodnestingforest.com
Mummy Hood Nesting Forest is a site to get lost: a forest, a URL, and a new work of fiction by artist David Steans. The commission takes the form of a multipart story hosted online in its entirety via a bespoke website. A macabre story about storytelling, preparedness, and packable techwear, Mummy Hood Nesting Forest uses the provisional scenario of a hiker getting lost in the woods to conjure, recur, rewrite, and exhume. The website functions both as a specific context informing the story and a contrived situation for engaging with it. Accompanied by 3D animation, graphics, and acousmatic music, the injunction to get lost – in the forest, in the narrative, in the text itself — is accentuated by the design of the site.
The bespoke website will be live from 7 November 2022 at 9:00am (GMT).
Please note: You can use your phone in Mummy Hood Nesting Forest, but desktop computers work best. The website has several loading assets and behaviours including auto-playing sound and streaming video, which may effect browser function over time. A minimum internet speed of 8MBps is recommended.
A plain text version of the project is available on request. Please email: admin@weareprimary.org
David Steans is an artist based in Leeds, working primarily in writing, moving image, sound and music. He uses recursive or 'nested' forms of narrative, storytelling, reality/fiction ‘blurring’, and a kind of ‘versioning’, whereby projects and ideas are developed through successive iterations (a process he associates with the mutations and spectral residues of genre dynamics). Some of his specific interests/ambitions in respect of genre include conjuring a sense of (genre) horror in and around the technologies, media and processes of cultural production (such as writing and filmmaking).
Recent work has been commissioned by/exhibited at: Deptford X, London; Pavilion, Leeds; Workplace Gallery, London/Gateshead; Triangle Arts, Brooklyn; Viborg Kunsthal, Denmark and The Tetley, Leeds. In 2021 he was commissioned to write a new text, Curtainz, for ‘Documents of Contemporary Art: Magic’ (Whitechapel Gallery/MIT Press). His writing has also been published by Project X Foundation, Journal of Creative Writing in Practice and Ma Bibliothèque.
