'Uh - Oh' Solo exhibition at Creekside Projects, Performed by Rubie Green, Naz Smouna and Matt Dommett. The work examines the relation between the Teletubbies and emergent language and technologies. A strange homage to the 90s children’s television series Teletubbies, using performance, text, stage, humour, film and painting.
The images played a more explicit homage, the text a more fractured tribute. Controversy surrounded the Teletubbies when it was first aired due to the ‘nonsense-speak’ of the Teletubbie characters as well as its design for young infants at the pre-speech level. At a turning point in technological advances, the relationship young children may have with technology was still Undecided. Teletubbies portrayed (predicted) toddler-like creatures with technology embedded within them; the TV screens implanted into their abdomens. Twenty years later technology is far further embedded into our everyday lives, the inserting of technology into the body a far less distant possibility.
Technology is part of the next generations life from birth. The installation took the same playful approach to language as Teletubbies. While the words form into sentences these appear as nonsense, surreal and fantastical. Whilst some words allude to the futuristic aspects of Teletubbies, “fictional automated computer land” others conjure surreal child-like fantasy images “astro turf hairs”. With each language is treated playfully, words used for their rhyming, rhythmic and phonetic qualities not only for their meaning.
