Chris Doyle: The Fabricators - A Future Built on Buffalo

Upon visiting home for the holidays, our travels drift past the once native rich land of Oklahoma. Brimming with casinos and cannabis dispensaries, evidence of an extinct way of life, I am reminded that for Native Americans labor no longer balances in the simplicity of survival engaging both the body and the mind. The evolution in fundamental truths, namely security, rendered the daily cadence of securing food, shelter, safety & tribal narratives obsolete by removing their source of survival, the buffalo. Our postmodern world, envisioned in Doyle’s industrialized imagination in “The Fabricators”, dreams to eliminate all labor of both the body and of the mind, a machine to produce every corporal & creative need. 3D printed housing, food, machine guided weaponry & sex with the push of a button freeing us to industrialize our imaginations with computer generated art & travel. Our advanced society automates every aspect of the human experience seeking a perfect life void of all labor, the ultimate dream. Susceptible to elimination, the buffalo remind us to question if this technology dependent way of life differs from that of the Native Americans. Doyle’s digital display, the hide of the buffalo, envisioning for us a future projected on a fragile digital landscape. I question the vision of a fully automated future. The laborman retains the wheel. The artist retains the burnt branch. The warrior retains the arrow, all truths that remain immortal. The leisure man gambles these things, reminding us along with the native people, that the future ultimately resides in fundamental truths.