JPEG Bolton
Wiremass I, II, III
3 overlapping looping films. Here, the raw image code of original photos of biological matter is injected with the Paris Climate Change Agreement and other text that virtualise the earth, such as Google Earth HTML. The soundtracks were made through a similar process of text-editing MP3 files.In transnational government initiatives to save the planet, the reverse is true: something totally physical (the earth) is converted into something virtual, speculative, something to be administered and moderated. The language of the Paris Climate change agreement attests to this: the word ‘ocean’ appears only once throughout the entire document. The much more abstract ‘Climate’ appears 48 times. There is no mention of ice. Basically, the planet gets treated like a dataset, something without form.
HD video x 3 / 00:25 min each
FBRZ VLL
Boarded
The ongoing series focuses on the rather underappreciated, complex and mesmerising circuitry that once laid within most families’ home PCs. Where at a certain point in time these electronic behemoths acted as the pinnacle of technology in each household, now they are nothing more but an obsolete and bulky amalgamation of components.
In an attempt to revitalise these thrown out and discarded pieces of technological advancements, FBRZ gathered and acquired a vast array of PCs from all around the island and stripped them down to their core. Utilising the Mother board’s traces to create a new visual flow where electricity once rushed. Giving these computers and their innards a much-deserved spotlight and second chance at life, as futile as it might be.
The harsh reality though is that there is still the lingering fact that the actual individual PCs are still essentially useless in their current state and are being discarded at a large scale. Creating enormous electronics dumping grounds in lesser developed areas, were under the guise of recycling, a vast array of people are working in horrendous conditions to retrieve as much salvageable and technologically crucial materials as possible including gold, copper and cobalt. Risking their livelihood in order to be able to make a living and for the rest of us to be able to satisfy our needs for the latest technological advancements.
Digital images x 3
Milos Peskir
Digital Fossil_Corrupt Galatian
Physical fragility of digital material and human perceptive adaptation, over time, create a world of abstract understanding. By sedimenting/compressing/tarring the “Digital stratosphere”, “Digital Bug” comes to light from “Digital Pit” as an example of the artistically (audio/visually) exciting result. Corrupt Galatian represents, besides fight for the life of a corrupt digital file, struggle of audio/visual elements. The evolutional closeness of the man and a digital artefact, as an aesthetical/ontological base for this concept: the physical existence of digital – Inner struggle – digital death – digital remains – a corrupt image of yourself – self culturcide.
HD video / 03:00 min
Kornelia Remø Klokk
DERELICT UTILIZATION OF SUSTAINABLE TRANSFORMATION
DERELICT UTILIZATION OF SUSTAINABLE TRANSFORMATION, also known as D.U.S.T., embodies the destructive manipulation within the act of creation. The structures of being are dismantled and ground into a powdered form of ruination, for the sole purpose of being resurrected once more. D.U.S.T. is the original element. The first matter of existence. D.U.S.T. is the last element. The cause and effect of destruction. D.U.S.T. is the loop of materiality.
HD video / 7:22 min
Mustafa Khanbhai
GEN SF
Strangler figs (such as the banyan tree) are a highly adaptive species because of their ability to cycle functions across the various parts of their bodies. The boundaries between root, trunk and branch steadily dissolve as the tree grows and nutrients flow in strange paths throughout its body.
It is a creature that suggests a map for the troubling times to come, times of ecological catastrophe for which our neat, segregated socio-economic structures are ill-prepared and will likely crumble..
HD video / 04:40 min
Erica Jewell
Power Plant
Powerplant investigates the ways in which we conceive of the (in)visible infrastructure of the Internet: the switches, routers, underwater cables, signal repeaters, servers, and data centres across the globe and the coal, oil, natural gas, nuclear reactions, wind, sun, and waves that it takes to use them.
The project invited people from around the globe to keep a plant alive by switching on lights in a real-world installation. Each set of three lights visualizes the power consumed by one visitor to the site using measures indicated in the Journal of Industrial Ecology. Visitors could watch the lights over the plant turn on and off in real-time as others joined and left. Over the month-long duration of the project, the plant grew and developed a new leaf.
The project explores the invisible components of global infrastructure that cross continents and oceans to serve the Internet. This complex, massive, human-made apparatus provokes awe at the ability of humans to coordinate and maintain such a vast global structure and at its invisible nature that keeps it out of mind and allows us to forget the consumption and waste it necessitates.
website
Bailey Keogh
Capitalist Reparations
Capitalist Reparations invites website visitors to mine cryptocurrency on their office computer during working hours as an attempt to generate reparations for the unfair compensation capitalism provides in exchange for labour.
website
Chen VarsanoFomats
‘In the lifetime of a file from its birth to its infinite roaming on the web, it changes a lot. Hito Steyrl defined the process as a poor image, but in my research, I expended it to many types of files. Suppose when you take a photo digitally, it is being translated into a machine code that is not intended for human reading, but even though the machine translates it into pixels and data, this unclear code still exists in a completely digital world that has no place for us humans, solely for machines, and it allows them to communicate within themselves… So it was very interesting for me to look at what happens behind computer formats and what happens when the computer can’t communicate with itself because of human disruption. In this project I made different types of files, audio, picture, video, 3D, operating system files etc. and I converted each file to a different format and documented the results.’
website
Enrico DedinDigital Tribalism
This digital tribalism is investigated with a sociological slant beyond the easy temptation to dismiss it as mere fanaticism. This phenomenon is the reflection of an Internet that becomes more and more space for extremist opinions and personalized information, for example, thanks to the algorithms of the most used search engines. The neotribalism that moves on the web reflects the crisis of institutions and traditional identities as well as the intolerance to the lack of a community and offline social bond. In the absence of this, to consolidate the social relationship there is no other common basis than consumer goods, in fact, they are the latter together with the media to produce the collective imagination today. But on this basis, this attempt to re-establish a community-type social bond by resisting post-modern dynamics ends up by commercializing, even more, the relations between individuals, subjecting them to brand mediation. Brands acquire a totemic function, they become a substitute of religions and individuals remain “mass hermits”.
HD video x 2 / 30:00 min, 10:00 min