Jo Pester is interested in the ways her work can reject disembodied and universal perspectives, illusions that feel very seductive, especially in digital culture.
Jo Pester (b. 1992, Bristol) is a London based artist working with video, sound and installation. She splices together and distorts found and recorded media, stories of fiction and reality, serious play and humour, whilst revealing her own manipulation and culpability in the process of the work’s construction.
Her work evolves from wanting to be explicit about the situatedness of the different actors within the videos, considering ways the digital medium can facilitate or enact forms of embodiment. The physical camera, and the bodies, sites and contexts in relation to it, are a constant concern.
Jo Pester has presented work at Ecofutures Festival in London; Casa da Dona Laura Gallery (Lisbon); Good Sport Canada (Canada) and The Horse Hospital (London) and has recently been selected for the BF Artist Film Festival IX in London and Lancaster. In 2018 she was nominated for the Almacantar Studio Award and the Dolbey Travel Award from the Slade School of Fine Art, where she completed an MA in Fine Art Media.
Octopuses are actually space aliens whose frozen eggs first came to Earth aboard an icy meteor
HD Video / 06:32 min / 2019
‘Octopuses are actually space aliens whose frozen eggs first came to Earth aboard an icy meteor’ is filmed using a number of cameras attached across the artist’s body as an attempt to enact a technologically mediated sense of embodiment inspired by the octopus. This filming approach stems from the intrinsically embodied nature of octopuses whose ‘brains’ are spread throughout their bodies, and whose various limbs can act without instruction from a centralised nervous system based on feedback from their environment.