According to Ecclesiastes "The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth - it is the truth which conceals that there is none. The simulacrum is true."1 When analyzing the simulacrum that makes up popular culture and visual arts today Jean Baudrillard noted that "The transition from signs which dissimulate something to signs which dissimulate that there is nothing, marks the decisive turning point." 2 It is his interest in this construction and destruction of simulacra that places the art of Alex Hetherington at this decisive turning point.

Alex Hetherington is a contemporary digital artist based largely out of Scotland. In 2004 he presented an animation short called Glasgowland at the Edinburgh Film Festival3. In addition to his animation work, Hetherington creates digital collage images available on the Internet. These images cull influence from disparate sources including, perhaps most notably, Japanese manga animation. One of Hetherington's most recent projects is an interactive website found at www.momoyoculture.com. Navigating this website is a disorienting experience - the viewer is bombarded with disparate imagery and text. Similarly to the digital prints the website includes visual simulation of Japanese imagery. When navigating the website, links lead off to pages that seemingly have little explicit correlation with one another aside from the characteristically seductive and lush imagery found consistently throughout the website. The content of the text on the website is fragmented. Seemingly schizophrenic incomplete sentences float across the screen on their own accord. This disorienting experience of navigating through a virtual space filled with appropriated cultural references reflects Hetherington's interest in simulated ephemerality that counters notions of easily definable experiences. This sensibility will be further examined in this essay through an exploration of Hetherington's choice of medium, use of Japanese appropriation, thoughts on community building and opinions on the academicization of art.

In e-mail correspondence with Hetherington we discussed how the internet as his medium of choice influences his practice and its dissemination. Using digital medium allows the dissemination to take on a more democratic form of ownership. Hetherington notes that this form of distribution allows for "ownership, interactivity, democracy, input and invitation"4. However, to Hetherington, these properties of dissemination are more like fortuitous side-effects to the main draw of the medium. For Hetherington the main draw is the ability to work in non-physical space which allows for the opportunity to "switch off, return, rewind, stop, disrupt a structure and replace a narrative"5. Hetherington pushes the limits of the medium even further by using it as an opportunity to examine what defines 'real' physical space especially as it manifests itself in 'non-real' mental spaces such as memory. As an illustration of this concept Hetherington referenced the video work of Douglas Gordon. His work '24 Hour Psycho' was a screening of Hitchcock's film Psycho slowed down to last 24 hours. The key to this piece, according to Hetherington, is that it was set to play continuously even when the gallery was closed. As the physical experience of viewing this movie was denied during the closing hours of the gallery it was forced to exist in memory. Hetherington notes that "psycho within our consciousness always exists so his work was manifesting this… I think in many ways working within digital media is a way to extend the possibility of this further"6. The Hitchcock film is a simulacrum of a simulated acting performance representing a fictional story. Hetherington is interested in how this artificiality is manifested and extended into the 'real' memories and thoughts of the individuals who continue to think about the video even as it is being continuously projected into an empty gallery. This brings us back to Ecclesiastes' comment that "The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth - it is the truth which conceals that there is none. The simulacrum is true"7.

Footnotes:
1 P 169 Baudrillard, Jean. 1986. Jean Baudrillard. Stanford. Stanford University Press.
2 P 173 Baudrillard, Jean. 1986. Jean Baudrillard. Stanford. Stanford University Press
3 www.nesta.org.uk/mediaroom/newsreleases/3718/, Nesta Creative Investor, last accessed April 13, 2005
4 e-mail correspondence between Alex Hetherington and Christina Gray, March 21, 2005
5 ibid
6 ibid
7 p 169 Baudrillard, Jean. 1986. Jean Baudrillard. Stanford. Stanford University Press.