The Waste Land - A Collapsing World

" Meet with "The Cabinet"

UWE The Bower Ashton library, Bristol, UK

Book Arts (uwe.ac.uk)

2022 celebrated the centenary of first publication of TS Eliot’s landmark poem The Waste Land. To mark the occasion artist Gino Ballantyne has produced a selection of events, exhibitions and two publications of Eliot’s poem creating a dialogue between Eliot’s world in 1922 and Gino’s world today. A digital book published at The Buckingham Literary Festival 2022. The digital book serves as both an introduction and translator to a one-of-a-kind illustrated artist’s book, published December 2022.

This artist’s book is a collaged network of communication combining drawn images, abstracted soundscapes and textual, binary, hexadecimal languages. The Waste Land and the Collapsing World seek the universal meaning of life in a fragmented world where time and civilisation are collapsible.

During the festival Gino installed an interactive exhibition in The Vinson Building at Buckingham University, June 2022. Where Gino created an interactive Binary Wall in collaboration with the School of Computing led by Professor Harin Sellahewa, Dean of Computing at Buckingham University. ‘A powerful visual response to Eliot’s poem, Gino explores a collapsing world where our habits and notions of identity, reality and truth symbolise our disconnect with civilisation, the natural world and human consciousness"

Vivienne Wordley

The Waste Land offers a complex vision of a machine led, money orientated, culturally bereft, devastated world, Eliot spotlighted the ambiguity present in the human condition. It suggested ambiguously framed realities conditioning the varied perspectives in human society. Eliot compounds any meaning through his modernist fracturing style both subverting the literary conventions of his day and questioning any sense of order. For Gino those questions are splintered by time, technology, human activity and notions of the primacy of the human condition at the dawn of an artificially intelligent world.

Does this mean the human condition will become less important as the advancement of artificial intelligence broadens. Should we grieve for the loss of the human condition if our civilisation is governed by a technological utopia? Will human advancement decay and civilisation become a collage of augmented commodities, these questions are important and are at the heart of Eliot and Gino’s dialogue. Eliot adopts his imaginary and involuntary memories to prime his intellect giving abstract notions of faith time for a feeling of hope to arise. Set this against 2022’s instant data transactions, discarding notions of time, submitting to the immediacy of the moment, truth decays and opinion dominates.

Isolation and permanence of the human condition its causal activity and the relevance of reality to both situation or intention in relation to Time means reacting against both universal and singular realities and their projected stories. It is communion with the Real abstracted through space and Time the simple and everyday Eliot and Gino express.

The Waste Land. © The Estate of TS Eliot, published by Faber and Faber Ltd appearing with the kind permission of the TS Eliot Estate.

The Waste Land - A Collapsing World

The Vinson

The University of Buckingham

The Buckingham Literary Festival 2022

www.bucklitfest.org

2022 celebrated the centenary of first publication of TS Eliot's landmark poem "The Waste Land". To mark the occasion artist Gino Ballantyne has produced a selection of events, exhibitions and two publications of Eliot's poem creating a dialogue between Eliot's world in 1922 and Gino's world today.

Throughout the festival there will be a special interactive installation in the Vinson. Gino invites you to add your responses which will be translated into binary code and added to the digital "Binary Wall" which Gino in collaboration with the the School of Computing led by Professor Harin Sellahewa, Dean of Computing at The University of Buckingham made as part of the exhibition.

Gino introduces a digital iteration of his book "The Waste Land by TS Eliot in dialogue with Gino Ballantyne A Collapsing World" via a QR code released at the festival.

The digital book serves as both an introduction and translator to the a one of a kind artist book to be published, December 2022. The artist book is a collaged network of communication combining drawn images, abstracted soundscapes and textual, binary, hexadecimal languages. The Waste Land and The Collapsing World seek the universal meaning of life in a fragmented world where time and civilisation are collapsible. 

The Waste Land. © The Estate of TS Eliot, published by Faber and Faber Ltd appearing with the kind permission of the TS Eliot Estate.