Drive Crisis Preacher is a virtual reality environment. The scenography of a fictional cyberpunk dystopia merges with old and new video and sculptural works to create an immersive VR experience. Visitors are invited to explore this world and its spatial and narrative situations. Drive Crisis Preacher’ consciously quotes the narrative forms and aesthetics of computer games such as “Deus Ex” (2000) or “Descent” (1995), as well as films such as “Brasil” (1985), “28 days later” (2002), “Matrix” (1999), “Robocop” (1987) or “Blade Runner” (1982). At the same time, Patrick Alan Banfield brings artefacts from his own life into the environment through the integrated videos and sculptural objects. The viewing habits and expectations of the corresponding films and video games are served, sharpened and satirised. This hype around dystopian worlds of experience is both the content of the investigation and a consciously chosen approach to self-reflection and examination of the artist’s own life reality. Visitors embark on a VR course that brings together Patrick Alan Banfield’s personal development – determined by fears, longings, intuitions and experiences – through recurring elements of his work in this dystopian setting. These include fragments of earlier video works such as “My View” (2018/2019), “U4R” (2018) and previous installations such as “The Last Resort” (2019), “The Mill” (2013) and “Saulus Taunus” (2018).

“Drive Crisis Preacher” is conceived for a large, real exhibition space where visitors can physically walk around, bend down and get close to the spatial narratives. It is room-filling VR. The graphics of the VR environment are calculated live on a PC: When visitors put on the VR headset, they stand in the middle of the high streets of a dystopian city, illuminated by neon signs, above which hovers a 1986 Lego Classic Space spaceship: GAMMA 2. GAMMA 2 scans the streets with a bright searchlight. Genuine artistic contributions are embedded in the “Drive Crisis Preacher” environment, which can be discovered bit by bit. They form a second level.

Some of the virtual buildings have large public displays, similar to those in Tokyo’s Shibuya district. They show old and new films by Patrick Alan Banfield. In contrast to the gloomy city, one film shows the rural idyll of the German Allgäu, with village and nature shots. This leads to questions of virtualisation, when “real” nature is staged within the virtual cyberpunk world. The “outside” and the “inside” are reversed here. It can be assumed that the spatial location of the visitors within the game environment additionally influences the perception of the films. Thus, the prototypical ideal world scenario of the untouched Allgäu within the cyberpunk world refers to its status and possible scenarios there: How did it come to be that the world looks like this, and why do the primeval forests of Baden-Wuerttemberg collide here with crumbling, graffitied facades and roadblocks? Who is playing these films here?

Digital sculptures of various sizes are embedded and hidden in the scenography of the dystopian streets. The sculpture ‘Drive’ shows a rotating Janus-faced mask on a turntable, above which hovers a larger-than-life spider. This sculpture transforms a real sculpture shown in the exhibition “ASMR” (2020) into virtual space. A miniature porn cinema, inspired by the Parisian “Beverley”, the size of a shoebox, sits next to the kerb. This is a reference to the culture of Western erotic cinemas from the 1970s onwards. However, like a Pipilotti Rist installation or a Lego cinema, the roof is missing, so that visitors can look directly at the miniaturised red rows of seats and the screen showing an excerpt from Pipilotti Rist’s video work “Red Body Letter” (1992). By leaning down, visitors can peer into the cinema and watch the wild, playful video about sexuality and the female body.

Text by Patrick Alan Banfield