Blemish on Fruit

To coincide with Ahren Warner’s solo exhibition, prosper, despite a sense of crisis, Tube Gallery is pleased to present the screening of Toby Ziegler’s The Visual Genome (2019), in dialogue with Warner’s Live like you’ve never lived before (2022).

The Visual Genome and Live like you’ve never lived before are two film-works situated conspicuously between language and its failure, between the sign and its often comically disobedient referent, and between the felt and the said.

In The Visual Genome, Ziegler offers a playful interrogation of algorithmic absurdism, producing a video that exploits the ambiguity between visual description and text-to-image prompt, intertwined within the fractured logic of an online image-search function.

Just as Ziegler’s work seems to hold us at the point where the logic of a system threatens to break down into what Immanuel Kant called a “rhapsody of perceptions,” so too Warner’s Live like you’ve never lived before is preoccupied with a (highly consumerist) car-crash between systems failure – communication, capital – and the persistent motivations of desire.

If both films explore contemporary incarnations of the disjunction and distance between what is felt or meant, and what can actually be said, Ziegler’s work – in its percussive drive and its unremitting visual allure – reminds us of the very human impulse to continue to seek, to project, but therefore often to find, the meaning we require.