ARTISTS TALKING

'Trackers', a show coordinated by Charles Danby and Alejandro Ospina, takes Luke Rhinehart's approach in Dice Man in its concerns of chance and negating the authorship of curating. Twenty-one artists were asked to produce work to be placed within the space using a system of dice and co-ordinates. The outcome was intended to produce a dynamic show without curatorial parameters, and presumably rid the space of ego and uniform.

The exhibition is split into two spaces: some work is displayed in the exuberant surroundings of Pitzhanger Manor and the rest is in the adjacent contemporary gallery. In Pitzhanger Manor the work seems to have been chosen due to its collusion with the history of the building. Ben Judd's I Love, a documentation of a porno club with a loving soundtrack, is shown in the breakfast room, highlighting the fact that John Soane used the house for entertaining. Neil Hamon's nostalgic video Bletchley and fake period chest of drawers which frames the image, plays off the fake reproductions of Hogarth's A Rake's Progress which Soane acquired in their heyday. The eating room and extension, which behaves like a ballroom floor, is accentuated by the break beats of a compiled sound study, and Soane's anthropological hoarding is laid bare by UK Museum of Ordure which entices the audience to preserve ordinary artifacts.

In the adjacent custom gallery space the main conceit of the show takes place.

The dice man rolls to bunch the collective together and the randomness of fate and chance take place. Charles Danby takes the central point of the space; the restless nature of the work lends itself to the idea of random placing. There is room here to let the pieces wander, with fragments of each of the artists work tiptoeing into each other. This system is most apparent in the far corner where Rob Smith's work intertwines within pieces by Alejandro Ospina and Maria von Kohler. LOOP, by Smith and Cycle by Ospina almost become one; the boundary of where one begins and one work finishes becomes blurred, suckling the same power source. Koler's Superhero wallpaper lines the walls at the back. Made up of Spiderman erasers clinging rhythmically to the wall, the rows are repeated a little nearer to the viewer's eyelevel so the blue dots come into focus, revealing their appearance.

In order to underline the constraint of the project – the curators' decision to hand the placing of the work over to the role of a dice – there was a real feeling that the work within the gallery had fortunately found itself with enough room, and not enough bump and grind. No bunches, no large expanses of space. Nathaniel Rackowe's kinetic structure fudges its way through another work, questioning the notion of giving an artwork its own wall or floor space, and promoting the notion of chance. Understandably, in order to hand the show over to a mathematical process the exhibitors must not tamper with the system's set-up: working around the problems of where the dice has placed them, avoiding hierarchies and ignoring creative decision-making. The feeling that the curatorial set-up has not stayed true to its original concept is enforced by Bruce McLean, the grand daddy of the group, who had 'fortunately' rolled the correct co-ordinates for his work to be placed within its own space in the doorway of the gallery.

Using the notion of discovery through chance, maybe fate sometimes plays into the hands of collusion.