David Claerbout, to 5th May 2018
 
Belgian-born Claerbout shows projected photographs and videos, most of which I have to say didn’t do a great deal for me, even though some monochrome pictures of ordinary scenes of children playing on what looks like a Belgian beach such as that at Zeebrugge is projected two stories high and twice as wide. Holiday snaps this big? What’s that about? But in a smaller space upstairs (one of those dark rooms you find in all contemporary galleries these days, where you feel your way around wondering whose toes you’re going to stand on) there was a wonderful video around ten minutes long called Travel. This, with some somnambulant music in the background followed a trail into a forest and wound its way round some magical, natural scenes, green, atmospheric – everything people of a certain age might remember from an advert for menthol tipped cigarettes, in fact. The smoothness of the camera’s travel suggested something unreal, even though the foliage and detailed landscape looked ultra-real. It is only after a little way into the forest that scenes develop which provide clues as to its origin. The whole thing is computer generated. Apparently the film was 17 years in the making. It reminded me of E.M. Forster’s prescient short story The Machine Stops inasmuch as the screens that made the living space walls in Forster’s post-global destruction underground cities might well have had calm reassuring views like this. All artificial and all made by systems we will cease to understand – or control. The future can be cleansed of negative images. When we’re all walking around wearing virtual reality goggles as the world around us collapses we will only see nature as it ought to be seen. Nature as natural as it is portrayed in Travel is actually sinister and menacing in its surface masquerade.