Christopher MacInnes: Terra regis / terra neminis (2023)

Anonymously perturbed, a shopping trolley careens across a nondescript parking lot. It shunts another, which in turn is caught by a gust of momentum. A pigeon alters course to avoid collision, flapping into the air and landing backwards.

Commissioned by Phoenix and Off Site Project following an open call, Christopher MacInnes’s Terra regis / terra neminis (2023) is a new media-wall artwork responding to the current Virtual Textual exhibition.

Viewing the city of Leicester as a historical text, MacInnes collapses the aimless preoccupations of bored teenagers in a car park on top of the remains of King Richard III. Using a coded body tracking system, the artist translates visitors’ movements into a chaotic propulsion engine, to slingshot accurately rendered trolleys into curbs, streetlamps and beer bottles.

As a banal form of divination, MacInnes’s interactive artwork is humorously egalitarian, reminding us that the same roll of the dice that sees you whiling away an evening outside a Tesco Superstore, can also see kings buried beneath one.