Legend Extension II invites the viewer to ask, what if our memories and collective knowledge were recorded, rewound and re-recorded on to mouldy VHS tape? The video features crude 3D animation, archival footage and animated gifs with a voiceover in parts, written and narrated by the artist, that considers: contagious non-conscious mimicry and excavates debatable anecdotal facts – skewed as they are repeated time and time again. At points we find ourselves inside the dark recesses of a video tape cassette, as if exploring the corners of a pixelated 64-bit computer game environment. Legend Extension II is intended to allow room to consider slanted personal histories and a blurred nostalgia. Mundane misinterpretations, wrong translations, internal space and pulse. Class, micro and macro voids, a stomach. Breathing; ritualistic repetitions and faux mysticism.

Aled Simons studied, lives and works in Swansea, South Wales. The core of Simons’ practice explores pseudo-science, sham-ritual, anecdote, class and humour; found objects, crude sculpture, video, performance and writing. He often employs looping or repetition – the ubiquitous gif or meme format. Early 1990s television and its specific place at the junction of a shift between analogue broadcast and digital on-demand viewing. Inverted values – re-interpreting or misunderstanding the idea of an heirloom. Operating in the space between the tension release of a laugh and the awkwardness of things that go on too long or fall flat and fail.