Escape Engine was a three person show featuring Myles Painter, Peter Burr and Dana Giurescu. Escape Engine considered the multiple forms of the desktop – from physical surface to virtual plane – and its overlap as a site of escape and a space of production.

Myles Painter’s Desktop Drama is a repository for the fractured detritus of the research undertaken to make a new film. The film examines both the space of a computer desktop as the dramatic location for auto-didactism and the studio desk itself as a stage for the sporadic artefacts of a frustrated and procrastinated studio practice. A choreographed performance of studio objects, facsimiles of web pages and videos that have been captured throughout the research process in various museums and libraries present themselves on screen as though clumsily rebuilt from a once cohesive narrative. An erratic composition of nuanced vocal ticks and audio clips from the cutting room floor of edited interviews soundtracks the film. A mixture of 16mm film and digital footage,  desktop drama entangles two technologies together letting them fight it out like ideas born in the mind desperately validating themselves in the age of digital technologies.

Peter Burr’s Descent - made in collaboration with Mark Fingerhut and Forma – is a spiralling digital virus made as a meditation on the Black Death, one of humanity’s bleakest hours. Taking the form of a desktop application, descent.exe, it gives the user a brief glimpse of a world descending into darkness, an unrelenting plague indifferent to the struggles of the user. There is a silver lining however, tucked into the software’s final sweep. An equanimous watcher, reduced to a single eye, looks on as the plague of rats that has infested your desktop destroys itself.

Dana Giurescu’s Little Interludes project is an ongoing collection of the varied moments of everyday human experience: some tacit, some fleeting, some undefined. Giurescu’s films form an intimate view of haywire thought processes and encounters presented as vibrant and constantly shifting digital surfaces and musical compositions produced by the artist and fed back through the warmth of the CRT screens.