Helmet 2017

Abstract

"Baden Pailthorpe’s new body of work, Pitch Deck (2017), explores the potential application of financial analysis and machine learning in contemporary art. Combining elements of high quality 3D animation, custom gaming PCs, liquid cooling, roman armour, web scrapers, champagne and startup chic, Pitch Deck is conceived as a pitch to potential investors in a business based on cultural capital.

The central form of this body of work is a real company, Petricore Pty Ltd. Borrowing from key tenets of conceptual art, this company privileges concept over material form and challenges conventions of authorship and the status of the work of art. Pitch Deck, the exhibition's title work, serves as an expanded moving image pitch, whose artificially intelligent narrator outlines Petricore’s vision for an artworld inoculated against the unquantifiable risks of artworld participation.

Accompanying this work are four new 3D animations; Padding, Helmet and Incubator (all 2017). These display items of speculative merchandise and tailored environments to accompany the central startup pitch. The first two feature forms of protective equipment designed for artists competing in Pailthorpe’s computationally driven combat league. The third, Incubator, imagines a speculative startup hatchery, lush in colour and rich in venture capital. All four works are authenticated using blockchain cryptography through Ascribe, a decentralised and unbreakable digital contract between artist and collector.

In the algorithmically intense stages of late-capitalism, after the supposed death of the avant-garde, Pitch Deck asks us to consider whether today’s aesthetic and conceptual innovators have been absorbed by incubators rather than studios, funded by the interests of venture capitalists rather than patrons."