In summer 2012, Mike Nelson was commissioned to produce a new work on the university campus. Nelson, who represented the UK at the Venice Biennale last year and has twice been shortlisted for the Turner Prize, is best known for his environments that equate suggested literary fictions to spatial structures in immersive, atmospheric installations. His installation, The Ebb Tide, includes a series of ‘historic curiosities’ provided by the Archive of Modern Conflict, that evoked tales of lost cultures, mysterious places and the transformation of human experience by technology and conflict. Objects included the keys to the infamous island prison of Alcatraz, a piece of the first transatlantic telecommunications cable, plans for a Victorian time machine (that subsequently “vanished” without trace) and others that relate to humanity in conflict with itself and its environment.
Mike Nelson
