arebyte presents Rock Bottom, an exhibition by Abe Sugarman, the winner of hotel generation 2022, arebyte’s yearly programme mentoring the next generation of UK digital artists during the critical early stages of establishing a career in the arts.

Set inside a bottomless zone with no light, deep inside a cryptic ocean trench, Rock Bottom is a choose-your-own-adventure journey composed of games, video works and sculpture. Through this meandering twilight zone, concepts of queer time, queer survival, and Jellyfish Temporality escape and converge into animated characters and their unsettling environments. The exhibition implements emergent ecological systems, the materiality and power of restarting, and non-linear lifecycles as metaphorical pointers to introduce the narrative of survival; encouraging players to understand how (un)localised deep-rooted trauma and catastrophe can be comprehended. 

Bridging societal, interdependent and environmental parameters, the exhibition installation encourages players to become entangled within the game world and its material replication, through life-size monsters and theatre-esque props surrounding and backdropping the playable works. This newly commissioned exhibition concludes arebyte's 2022/23 programme Sci-Fi which looks at fictioning and alternative futures through a series of exhibitions, live performances, online experiences and educational activities.

The gallery is divided into zones dedicated to different areas of investigation within the exhibition: Northern values and patriotism, the possible productive power of the transitory Jellyfish lifecycle, and reconciling with fear and temptation of the unknown. The installation forms a web of locations within Rock Bottom; provincial garden centres, your ex's house, and a bodiless town centre in post-Industrial-somewhere all feel familiar but otherworldly.  

The exhibition questions how to live at death's door with cataclysms of many scales using seemingly non-compatible sites of discussion. Eutrophicated seas trigger blooms of the undead survivor in Jellyfish Fields, SpongeBob Squarepants’ enemy Mrs Whiskers journeys to an uncanny time in Rock Bottom, and the depths of the Calder Valley’s flood system come together to mirror a time of instability in crises of the environment in the River Calder Roblox environment. Eutrophicated seas trigger blooms of the undead survivor in Jellyfish Fields, SpongeBob Squarepants’ enemy Mrs Whiskers journeys to an uncanny time in Rock Bottom, and the depths of the Calder Valley’s flood system come together to mirror a time of instability in crises of the environment in the River Calder Roblox environment. Science-fiction-esque in its nature of imagining significant environmental change and portraying the meaning of time at the bottom of the ocean, Rock Bottom encourages us to understand worlds we don’t yet know, resisting engendered stereotyping and silencing of cast-aside voices. 

Adopting the Freudian notion of the Death Drive, the works in the exhibition examine the dominant push towards pessimism through behaviours such as aggression, self-doubt and self-destruction often accounted for by way of agendas outside of personal control. This self-perpetuating ideology of the instinctual seeking of pain is exacerbated and recounted back to use in strategies of governmental policy-making favouring more economically-stable regions or deceptive green-washing amongst many others. The works in Rock Bottom present post-apocalyptic thinking and argue for a “compulsive return to scenes of destruction [and] symptomatic of a traumatised culture.”

Falling into the deep aphotic ocean trench, as our protagonist does, reveals the inherent struggle towards escape when at the deepest point. The characters within Rock Bottom portray these Death Drive behaviours and sentiments through conversations, strange emotes, childhood absurdity and actions when interacted with. It becomes apparent that within the struggle and darkness of localised and planetary pain, light and optimism will emerge through the rethinking and recontextualising of spacetime.

(1) the process of a body of water becoming progressively enriched with minerals and nutrients
(2) Teresa Heffernan (2015) The Post-Apocalyptic Imaginary: Science, Fiction, and the Death Drive, English Studies in Africa, 58:2, 66-79, DOI: 10.1080/00138398.2015.1083198

EVENTS PROGRAMME

Opening Party
Thu 16 Mar 2023, 6:30-9pm
arebyte Gallery, unticketed event

Artist and curator tour of Rock Bottom
Sat 25th Mar, 5-6pm
arebyte Gallery, free tickets here
arebyte curator Rebecca Edwards and artist Abe Sugarman talk through the elements of the exhibition Rock Bottom. 

Jellyfish Temporality Workshop: Machines for Queer Time
Sat 15th Apr, 2-4pm
arebyte Gallery, free tickets here
Workshop with artist Abe Sugarman and writer Linda Stupart (Hacking the Anthropocene) A DIY-making workshop thinking about bodies/time travel/trauma and aliens.

EXHIBITION CREDITS

Main artist: Abe Sugarman
Sound: Ashton Stow
Curation & Set Design: Rebecca Edwards
Production: Rebecca Edwards, Nimrod Vardi, Shane Sutherland
Installation: Edd Butterworth, Rupert Earl, Noah Griffin
Unity Developer: Christopher Macinnes 
Roblox Developer: Ralph Sugarman
Technical Assistance: William Bennett
3D Assistance: William Bennett
Communications: Claudel Goy, Giulia Ponzano, Clauresse Amo-Yartey
Trailer: Shane Sutherland

How to play River Calder Roblox Game CAPS

Play River Calder Roblox multiplayer game at home during arebyte opening hours to play against visitors in the gallery.

READ THE EXHIBITION BOOKLET

Guest contributors: Jack Halberstam, Rebecca Edwards

ARTIST BIO

Abe Sugarman is a multimedia artist based in West Yorkshire. Abe uses their political proposal ‘Jellyfish temporality’: as a non-linear model of queer time and survival against geological stratification. Abe combines the circular and entwined web of bodies and systems that exist in the bio-membrane, where a diagrammatic tissue of lies and life cycles emerges through reverberation, compulsion, and restarting. In this newly formed ‘Anthrobussy’, the rehearsal assembles. Abe enjoys SpongeBob SquarePants, cuttlefish, and Gordon Riggs Garden Centre. Abe graduated from the Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford. Previous solo and group exhibitions include: Unit 1 Gallery Workshop, London; Ruskin Project Space, Oxford; Five Folds, London

DESKTOP TOUR
Series hosted by artist Marc Blazel where artists talk through their desktop, key folders, bookmarks, and software they use in their work.

TALKING HEADS
Experts within the digital arts sector are invited to review and discuss the works of the exhibiting artist.