Automated Fantasy Procedure at Matt’s Gallery, London harks back to the post-internet art boom
For certain visitors, Joe Moss’s installation Automated Fantasy Procedure will likely inspire pangs of nostalgia. In terms of its visual tics, it harks back to the ‘post-internet art’ boom of the late 2000s and early 2010s: there are nods to surveillance culture, prompts to horror-flick uncanniness, an obsessional attention to online aesthetics and the ways in which they bleed into everyday life; a preoccupation with drone warfare and a (justifiably) Cassandra-ish attitude to the increasing agency of the machines on which we’ve come to rely. Yet if he has anything to differentiate him from its leading lights – Cory Arcangel, Hito Steyerl, Petra Cortright et al – it’s that in the intervening two decades the internet has emerged from its infancy.
Automated Fantasy Procedure doesn’t lack for incident. A squadron of small research drones hovers menacingly above the visitor’s head, executing a choreographed performance. Two screens mounted on aluminium frames display a two-channel video in which a host of fictional human archetypes stalk loaded, real-life sites, or pop up in green-screen on a 3D-printed set designed to resemble a data farm; they even perform a dance routine to a retro indie-pop number. Propped up against a wall is a Roman-style mosaic depicting two intertwined human figures – a nod back to an ancient craft intended as a counterweight to the digital components elsewhere. All this is experienced within the course of scheduled ten-minute replays, and if it feels like too much, too quickly – that may well be the point. The installation aspires to the sensation of smartphone scrolling, or to a hyperactive manifestation of a deficient attention span.
Much of the video was filmed within the gallery itself, throwing a disorienting mise en abyme into the mix. The actors playing Moss’s characters – a ‘horror’ figure in a grotesque fright mask, a windswept Romantic based on Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer above the Sea of Fog (1818) – pace its floorspace, at times filmed from above by the drones whining away overhead. Other scenes were shot on location: in sight of the vast satellite dishes of a GCHQ listening station; on a beach beneath which, the exhibition notes tells us, data cables connect the UK mainland to the global network; on a wind farm subjected to an assault from a moustachioed Don Quixote stand-in. It amounts to an indiscriminate melting of fictional registers; of the past with the present; of technological systems with the infrastructure that facilitates them.
Meanwhile, a console of flashing lights positioned on the reverse of one of the screens may or may not be controlling or regulating the spectacle; we’re left none the wiser. These disparate narrative threads promise meaning, but the sum of their parts is entirely inscrutable; there isn’t even any real analysis of the systems the artist identifies. In this respect, Moss distils the sensory experience of informational overload, and the feeling of powerless illiteracy that comes with it. But then so have many artists identified with the ‘post-internet’ phenomenon – and one wonders whether the proposition remains one worth articulating.
Automated Fantasy Procedure at Matt’s Gallery, London, 24 January – 15 March 2026
