Without distinguishable rhyme or pattern, white, red and black permeate the interplay, a colour scheme reminiscent of the post World War I movement, De Stijl4. The purity in form and line also recalls the works of the Russian Suprematists5. However, where these artists can be seen to have left the world of will and idea for a blissful sense of non-objectivity, the tomorrow's project exposes the inability and incoherency of this idealistic goal, using highly abstract forms as a vehicle for representing the chaotic, and highly subjective layering of human history in relation to space and identity, that can only unfold upon viewer interaction.

Dunlop describes these complex spaces as the "abandoned future" - built on images from the past. What results in these online spaces, are eerie play-toys for the homo ludens6 within the individual. The work is limitless, and it is difficult not to get lost within the intangible and ever-changing nature of the artwork itself. It speaks literally of layering and decaying forms of history, politics and culture - which, after the industrial revolution has shifted dramatically from monolithic shapes and seemingly impenetrable ideologies into tiny mutable fragments, accessible only when extracted from their original, or intended context.

The symbolic images of destruction, cars and family units conflate into veritable triptychs at once depicting the deterioration of a societal structure, while simultaneously depicting an industrial sublime. The subjective realities unveiled within, depend upon the actions and perhaps preconceptions of the viewer. It is within this communicative space where one can begin to examine the individual within the schemes of cultural, productivity while also realizing the potential for art to become activated.

One can see that if the "the material which really makes the difference comes up when you're chatting informally about the odd corners and the [inability to classify] the world,"7 so then it is easy to imagine a technologically advancing world that appears ever-changing despite its continually systematic repetition and reinterpretation of forgotten histories. The desire to look backwards in order to create forms for the present and future is so infused within history that one might begin to accept it as an inevitable part of the human condition. Conventional criticism agrees that modernism, insofar as it may be read as a meditation on history, is one which recoils from a degraded present to celebrate and to pine for a forfeited past and, as Dunlop notes is a "call to a human nature that never really existed."8 The political potential in art, specifically new media forms comes from "the play, pleasure, desire and will for a utopian aesthetic."9 Breaking canonical boundaries, both formal and modern, of what it means to be a culturally enlightened and politically active human being, is where the ability to "project and disrupt urban space,"10 a concern for Dunlop, must develop. The tomorrow's project symbolizes abstract computers language and the indecipherable technological codes as interstitial links tied to an inaccessible and sweeping notions of 'the world.' The work depicts that where language and ideas in themselves are abstract, it is the communication of these ideas which acts as their vehicle. Hence, these artists' work, unlike the early modernist painters rests its potential and force on the unsuspecting and hyper-modernly engaged viewer/audience.

In choosing to reveal the conceptual and ephemeral relationships between people and their spatial environments, these online spaces subvert the traditional norms of industrialism and architecture - oriented around external objects rather than human experience - by drawing from contemporary art practices that give priviledge to audience experience. The public space of the gallery and its online "other" afford contrasting possibilities for artistic interaction and experimentation. While one might aim to freeze time, the online experience can be described as transitory - even if revisited. An artwork that is ephemeral in its conception, construction and reception will create tensions in a museum that, by its nature, stops time, and it is in this and many other instances, where the process of mutability and transformation can be seen as a critical concern in the tomorrow's project. The complex social, political and economic factors affecting individuals in communities mean that there cannot be a unitary understanding of community or space. These interrelationships also fluctuate according to changing social and political realities.

The world inside tomorrow's is intolerant of 'truths' or 'values,' unless considered as local, and relative to the viewer. Identity, like beliefs and value systems are intended to be purely subjective and individualized - thus, intimating that there is no such thing as a 'masterpiece' or an 'ideal.' It is in this reality that the collaborative art of Gair Dunlop and Dan Norton attacks Modernism for its conviction in the possibility of any objective truth. Instead, one finds a distinct examination of how western society might risk deterioration towards a state of patterned, chaotic sameness, perhaps resulting in a form of intellectual inertia. If it is in Dunlop's hope that "the piece will be a place where audience engages in an active way, thus reflecting and foregrounding the montage effect of experience"11 then, like the pursuit of truth, does interactivity merely serve as a distraction from, and as a way to avoid, a life without meaning? Or is meaning to be found within this very same interactivity? "There is space in [these] archive related works for people to make their own linkages and connections."12 One may find a fragmented space where one can stumble online upon an interactive maze, difficult to extract one's self from - a place where technology, pleasure and propaganda collide.

In celebrating a sense of chaos and anarchy within the apt aesthetic modes of chance and randomness, life itself, cannot be merely an entropic decline towards nothingness and eventual death. The symbolic elements of this can be found in the tomorrow's project and interpreted, or not, depending on the needs and desires of the viewer and in this way does not limit itself to meta-narrative that Modernism subscribes to.

Footnotes:
4 An art movement that advocated pure abstraction and complicity. Form reduced to the rectable and other reometric shapes, and colour to primary colours along with black and white. Piet MOndrian (Dutch, 1872-1944) was the group's leading figure. Another member, painter Theo van Doesberg (Dutch, 1883-1931), had started a journal named De Stijl in 1917, which contnued publication until 1928, spreading the theories of the group. Their work exerted tremendous influence on the Bauhaus and the International Style.
5 Russian Suprematism, first movement of pure geometrical abstraction in panting, originated by Kazimir S. Malavich inRussia about 1913
6 "Main as Player", a book written in 1938 by Dutch historian and professor, Johan Huizinga. Before the last World War, this author wrote about teh coming of a new specimen of humanity; the playful human. Huizinga predicted that homo sapiens would soon be replaced by machines and robots and that there would be nothing left for humans but feeling, imaginations and creativity. Gair Dunlop identifies with the Situationist concept of homo ludens. The Situationists were concerned with transforming creativity from the traditional formal and theoretical experience into a social experiment.
7 Interview with Gair Dunlop, March 14, 2005
8 Ibid, March 15, 2005
9 Ibid, March 15, 2005
10 Ibid, March 15, 2005
11 Ibid, March 15, 2005
12 Ibid, March 15, 2005