The collusion of Facebook and more sinister organisations involved in harvesting personal data unwittingly shared by internet users has enabled highly efficient targeting of closely identified groups for the purpose of channelling information that seeks to influence the outcomes of democratic elections. The California tech dream has adopted the persona of Big Brother. His features are barely formed, almost teflon like in their bland and almost alien unaccountability.

Two paintings using the image of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg make ironic reference to this. But the paintings, despite presenting an illusion of roundness, are of course flat.Įlements and minerals necessary for technology and industry are obtained through mining, and the mutations in the international political landscape which has fast overtaken the world in recent years have been largely facilitated by a new and more sinister form of mining - data mining. The unpredictable process of oxidation entailed in this medium suggests global fragility. Some of the paintings depict the globe of planet Earth rendered in reactive metallic paint - a reference to the elements and minerals that form the substance of the Earth’s crust and from which the hardware of technology is fabricated. Keane has used the metaphor of Flat Earth theory by way of both illustrating and satirising world views which he finds both baffling and sinister. They invoke a profound irony - that the modern age of evidence based science and sophisticated technology has spawned a world wide web of conspiracy theory and alternative facts connecting a muddle of entrenched belief systems, stoked up by misinformation and cyber warfare, which have become ever more amplified in the echo chamber that is the internet. The collection of works in this show have been created over the last 2 years amid the context of turmoil and seismic shifts in the political landscape happening both domestically and globally. “Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities.” It reopens on September 16th (until October 31st 2020) at Flowers, Cork Street, London, under the new title VIRAL.) (This exhibition closed before it had really opened due to the outbreak of Corona virus and the implementation of lockdown.

Flat earth cat theory