Vast geologies are gouged from the earth every day to provide raw materials for our technology. We want this, because we need this wasteful and destructive process of scraping, crushing, washing and discarding in order to make the devices and systems that support our production as digital subjects.
THU 20 Aug 2015
6pm-9pm
West Space and Media Lab Melbourne
FREE
“With every upgrade, we dig deeper” — Liam Young
Vast geologies are gouged from the earth every day to provide raw materials for our technology. We want this, because we need this wasteful and destructive process of scraping, crushing, washing and discarding in order to make the devices and systems that support our production as digital subjects. But what if that emptiness, and the promises of its slick vendors, could be countered with something just as powerful? It would have to be just as enormous. Or just as stealthy, perhaps. This project conjures the ghost territories shadowed by our luminous technologies, the collective futures buried in the ground; it beckons us with stories powered by the most elemental energetic forces of all.
artists: Martin Howse (UK), Jonathan Kemp (UK), Pia Van Gelder (Sydney), Media Lab Melbourne
Thursday Aug 20 at West Space, 6pm-9pm, FREE
Martin Howse will conduct a live experiment using material substrate and the earth computer.
Pia Van Gelder will amplify an electronic circuit being built in real time – unlike her installation in the other gallery this performance is NOT relaxing. She has described it as ‘very Kittlerian’.
Dr. Jonathan Kemp will talk about earth energies whilst smelting some earth/ore in a hacked microwave so as to produce something transformed at the end of it. He has told us this is a perfectly safe thing to do.
Martin Howse operates within the fields of discourse, speculative hardware (environmental data in open physical systems), code (an examination of layers of abstraction), free software and the situational (performances and interventions).
http://www.1010.co.uk/org/
Pia Van Gelder’s art and interdisciplinary research explores theosophy, technology, science, counter-culture histories, DIY pedagogy, AV mysticism and what she calls ‘machinic affinity’ – feelings of closeness to a machine.
http://piavangelder.com/
Jonathan Kemp is an artist involved in the elaboration of life coding strategies usually by way of some breton-brut sleights of hand. He has a long history of speculative and situational life coding events elaborated as active makings-in-the-world and informed by an interest in ontology and the fiction inherent in such description.
http://xxn.org.uk/doku.php
Media Lab Melbourne are creative thinkers who address technological influx from a critical perspective through workshops, lectures, exhibitions, networking and sharing.
http://www.medialabmelbourne.com.au/
