Peter Burr builds labyrinths you can’t escape. The Brooklyn-based artist and master of computer animation creates vast pixelated worlds populated by digital detritus, hovering somewhere between abstraction and figuration, between the flat screen and an endlessly self-generating space. His recurring obsession is the “endlessly mutating death labyrinth”: boundless architecture filled with grey figures who circle without end, condemned to wander forever.
His work has been shown at Documenta 14 in Athens, Centre Pompidou in Paris, Reina Sofía in Madrid, MoMA PS1 in New York, the Barbican in London, Sundance Film Festival, Ars Electronica and Times Square Midnight Moment. In 2018 he was awarded the prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship, and his projects have been supported by Creative Capital and Sundance. Previously he worked under the alias Hooliganship, and in 2006 founded the video label Cartune Xprez, through which he produced hundreds of multimedia showcases presenting artists working in experimental animation.
At Kinomural, Peter Burr once again curates the programme for one of the walls, this edition titled Loop State. This time he also presents his own installation, Interstitial Maintenance, created especially for the festival.
Interstitial Maintenance presents Burr’s ongoing procedural artwork The Maintenance Game: a portrait of a building that accumulates residue from every cycle of its looping digital simulation. Maintenance workers move through stained corridors, past equipment left running, into rooms prepared for no one. The camera lingers on the small details of the world and occasionally catches a glimpse of those who tend it, sustaining a system always in decay.
Those workers are fully automated digital entities, generated by a slot machine that captures each user’s face during intake. They perform maintenance and repair across shifting modules governed by competing hydraulic AIs. The simulation runs without user intervention, unfolding in real time as inhabitants navigate tasks and systemic failures. This version is populated by faces captured in Nadodrze, the Wroclaw neighborhood that hosts Kinomural.
Sealant foam cures on a doorframe where something was patched. A corridor light cycles through its spectrum with no one underneath it. Wet flooring dries in the shape of a route someone took. Vending machines languish, still illuminated. The building gets inspected the way a building inspector would inspect it, except the inspection never concludes and no report gets filed.
Part of Burr’s larger Aria Engine project.
By Peter Burr, Sound by Warren Lee, Technical Direction by Oren Shoham
