Arkology - Thomas Doyle
Over the course of the last five years, artist Thomas Doyle has been building out the world of Arkology: a provocative sleight-of-hand that teases, tempts, and puts us on edge. Images of excavations. Interviews with experts. Websites and references. What are these excavations? What is this world? Who are these experts? What is this professional society? Art/archaeological in the ways that it pushes well beyond the boundaries of facts uncovered by excavation, but also in the way that it inverts the archaeological fixation with the past. Arkology asks what might be the shape of an archaeology of the future? Craft, art-production, process, material, mixed-media, performance all present, but also all pushing through the tissue of academic constructions of intellectual regimes of actualities.
As Thomas puts it:
“What’s behind the work is a bit hard to pin down, because it seeks to bring you along in an obviously fictitious story while simultaneously presenting itself as reality.
“I approached the original idea with a ‘what if’ scenario that’s perhaps more suited to a science fiction novel than an artist’s body of work (‘What if people started finding boxes filled with artifacts from the future?’). As an object-maker, I started the project by creating artifacts. This was rooted in two ideas that fascinate me: that an object can have an ‘aura’ that connects people over time and space (‘I can’t believe I am holding this tool that someone carved 700 years ago’; ‘I can’t believe these objects were created 30 years in the future.’). The other idea I find intriguing is peoples' desire to understand and hence (mis)interpret artifacts.
“I created The American Arkology Society website as a vehicle to package and explain the artifacts I made. I wanted to treat the objects as real artifacts from a parallel or future America, and so I devised a staid scholarly organization whose purpose is to study and interpret them. I’ve always loved the uncanny (and the double-take), and I’ve enjoyed creating the Society’s text, videos, historical timelines, etc., all as a way to buttress the illusion.
“The result is a sort of reality-bending project that is part deadpan hoax, part social commentary, and part science fiction story. I’ve tried to dig, what I think of as, a mirrored rabbit hole, where the ‘real world’ dips in and out of the story to destabilize the viewer. To that end, I recently stepped into the work; last year the Society ‘commissioned’ me to build a series of dioramas depicting the scenes based on arkologists’ research.”
For more information about Thomas and his work, follow these links:
