Solo show: Content Anxiety
Outernet, London, 2023 👀
In collaboration with WeTransfer’s editorial platform WePresent, Duncan Poulton was invited to show at Outernet – one of the world’s largest digital exhibition venues, which sits outside London’s Tottenham Court Road tube station. Poulton’s recent work in digital collage and video showed daily on the immersive, 23,000 square foot 16k screens.
The exhibition followed on from a two-month residency on WeTransfer’s homepage and an editorial interview for WePresent.
Installation views & video by Rob Hill
“Duncan Poulton is sifting through trash. It’s not just any old trash, either. It’s what he calls “digital trash”—the enormous quantity of content that users upload into the world every day without so much as a second thought, accumulating like waste around the web.
He’s surfing through Wiki Commons, through old eBay listings and random 3D modeling websites, downloading arbitrary, poor quality images that catch his eye and filing them away in neatly arranged folders on his desktop. In many ways, Duncan is a digital dumpster diver—recovering the things that no one has deemed worthy enough to even remember to delete, and repurposing these collected fragments into digital collages. In these rearranged forms, the forgotten finds new meaning and life.”
– Madeleine Morley
