Multimedia artist Joe Moss turns Matt’s Gallery into a playroom for surveillance technology in his latest intertextual, multi-verse installation.

Moss’ oeuvre often deals in sculptures, particularly smaller models that evoke themes of cuteness and vulnerability. In Automated Fantasy Procedure, two small drones take their place, flying overhead, recording a path shown on the two screens, but in a different time. Much like the errance of Don Quixote running through the wind farm, one of the scenes which intercuts the drone footage, Moss’ work exposes the ways we’ve created our own futility. This time, the sculptures look back—the cuteness and vulnerability are on us.

The central theme of Moss’ installation is “nodes”; talking to the gallery, Moss contemplates that ‘laptops or printers or anything that’s connected to a network that does its own updates, or carries out a process, is like [a network].’ What is effective about these nodes seems not to be that they’re “autonomous,” per se, but the fact that this means we can forget about them. Automated Fantasy Procedure has shades of irony, that our ability to be nostalgic, virtuous, or anything close to human is possible because of the unseen, automated, non-human processes that power us.

We see such “fantasies” in another intertextual reference within the film, a reproduction of Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer above the Sea of Fog (1818). Recreating the Romanticism, sublimity and, importantly, the Rükenfigur of Friedrich’s original, we get a sense of the turn towards nature and the motherland, away from modernity and progress, replicated here. The irony comes in how Moss’ choice of location is around a sea-cable landing station. ‘I wanted him to have this journey,’ Moss says, ‘where he’s trying to find the sublime on location, but also trying to come to terms with his position in the video, so he’s always quite disgruntled.’

What we also see here is a certain incongruity that runs through the piece. While Don Quixote, Friedrich, and drag queen Mama Dosa’s interpretation of Mrs Dalloway are all intertextual “nodes”, so to speak, Moss also presents them as incongruous in their contexts. This is where the voice in Moss’ work becomes a bit more ambivalent; do these fictionalised characters represent archetypes that drones work on? Moss doesn’t comment directly, clarifying only that the application of drones affects “concepts of agency,” which the characters mirror in their relationship to their archetypes.

We may situate these questions within the focus of the installation on “prolepsis”. For Moss, this is ‘a feeling of things falling into one another as technology accelerates’; subtly different is the gallery’s definition, that it is ‘a collapse of past, present, and future in which fiction, reality and ideas of progress fold into one another.’ In a broader context, definitions are just as disparaging; it could mean ‘the anticipation and answering of possible objections in rhetorical speech,’ or it could mean ‘the rhetorical figure in which a matter is stated in a brief summary manner before the particular details, aspects, etc.’

As a guiding principle, we can see the incongruity of Moss’ characters, as well as the way he places them within modern image/data collection systems, as a unity of these definitions. Sure, they literally collapse the past, present, fiction and reality in their encounter, bringing the acceleration of technological developments to the fore, but they also question our dystopian anticipations for this technology. While characters like Mrs Dalloway and Don Quixote represent the futility of humans, the drones’ reading of humans as these characters is just as absurd, just as much of a failure. Their programming and co-ordination is just as much a result of human creativity. As the characters dance during the “behind-the-scenes” portion of the film that the drones have captured, so too do the drones move in coordination with each other.

The resulting installation takes on a unique but necessary approach to anxieties around drones and surveillance, of co-operation and co-existence. Talking about automated systems like drones, Moss’ main concern is drone warfare; at the end of the film, we hear a bang, and as the video ends, only the drones and the uncomfortable feeling that it is war that really fuels our proleptic anxieties remain.

Automatons will only take over humans if we use them to kill each other first. On the contrary, Moss, who was at the gallery in the opening week, would go and check on the drones’ control panel between showings, hammering home a sense that the installation is really a creative collaboration between an artist and his automated colleagues. As technology does accelerate, we can be wary of it without losing sight of the many other outlets of human creativity, and how we can use this to work with automated procedures. Moss displays this wonderfully in Automated Fantasy Procedure, forming a defence of vibrant colour and creativity in the technological age that feels right at home at Matt’s.

Joe Moss: Automated Fantasy Procedure is on show until 15th March.

All Images: Joe Moss, Automated Fantasy Procedure, 2026, production still. Courtesy the artist and Matt’s Gallery, London.