In this exhibition, Ikon’s First Floor Galleries were transformed into a mass of plants and shrubbery for the first large-scale exhibition of work by Ben Sadler and Philip Duckworth, artists working in collaboration as juneau/projects/. Amidst ornamental thistles and chard, two major new commissions were combined with existing video, sound and performance works.

juneau/projects/ test the limits of electronic gadgets. While ?nding ourselves increasingly reliant and in love with gadgetry, our expectations of an efficient, time-saving future are often dashed. Early works involve consumer objects, such as mobile phones, CD walkmans, computers, televisions and tape machines, distressed and abused by the artists’ in a process leading to their destruction. These wilfully ingenious acts were documented on video and displayed in the galleries, alongside the tattered remains. For Stalker (2001), juneau/projects/ employed a marksman to hunt down a video camera hidden in a forest. As the video unfolds, the ‘stalker’ comes into view taking aim and firing at the camera, and so the machine records its own demise.

One of the new commissions, Beneath the floorboards of the forest, empty space forest, empty space (2006), featured a series of interactive work stations, where visitors could engage with a text-based ‘computer game’. A complex fictional narrative, it involved journeys through various landscapes and meetings with a range of visualised characters and creatures.

This exhibition was supported by the Arts Council England National Touring Programme and the Henry Moore Foundation. The exhibition tours to Wysing Arts Centre, Cambridge, Model Arts and Niland Gallery, Sligo and FACT, Liverpool.