Duncan Poulton


Duncan Poulton is an artist working with video appropriation and digital media. He reworks found content to address art-historical and mythological concerns, investigating ideas of reality, perfection and the copy in the digital age. His work has recently been shown at Tate Modern, Whitechapel Gallery, Sluice_ Art Fair, Eastside Projects, Phoenix Brighton, CineCity Film Festival, Latitude Festival and Plymouth Arts Centre.

Jetsam is defined as unwanted material or goods that have been thrown overboard from a ship and washed ashore, especially that which has been discarded to lighten the vessel. An assemblage of footage scoured from the depths of the internet, Jetsam is a study of the changeable, mercurial qualities of water and its relationship to the medium of digital video.

In the field of computer-generated imagery, liquids are a specific and recurring type of simulated object. It struck me that nearly every CGI artist, from amateur to virtuoso, has at some point published a fluid simulation to an online platform; each artificial body of water uploaded is in some small way unique. This work is an attempt to pool them together into something of a generated sea, constantly being added to from an ever-increasing number of tributaries.