Our obsession with More is destructive. The uncontrollable urge to want what one cannot have, drives us to progress – it synthesises and manufactures an ambition or desire. It redirects agendas and creates greed, arrogance and closed mindedness. The greed has driven the West to progress since mass production, spreads like a disease which is fed by a mass media system that tells us that we are constantly missing something from our lives and the only cure is even more consumption. There is too much food in the goldfish bowl. We are too fat, we can recite too many lines from cartoons, we know too much about celebrities, we spend too much money, we rely too much on technology.

“More is an ongoing series of digital lambdachrome prints by Irish artist, Alan Butler. These computer generated images feature a series of trees and plant life which have drowned in oceans of water. The trees lie still and lifeless in a peaceful aprés-desastre landscape. The images from the More series, which have featured in exhibitions in Dublin, Frankfurt and New York, offer a simple visual metaphor concerning Butler’s work in the field of media, consumption and information overload.”

As well as being very high resolution prints to display this kind of imagery on, lambda prints are a mid-point between a digital print and a photographic print. At first glance these images could be photographs rather than computer generated. Being photographic without the use of a camera, these images can be categorised as meta-photography. They do look realistic but they do look fake too. There is something too perfect about the situation, the water, and the sky. There is something too mathematical about the shape of the trees. Its a hoax. Yet born from the digitalness of it all, there is a peacefulness about the images. Through technology the More series retreats to nature and offers a time to reflect – in an environment appartently void of life.