MEMORIAL MATTER (2023)
Human-Machine Fellowship 2023 Project of the Akademie der Künste, Berlin in collaboration with Tin Wilke.
Our digital culture has a strong material condition, it is based on millennia-old temporal strata that contain the writing of the terrestrial life which is also the geological foundation where the archive of our collective memory has been written, from ancient to contemporary data technologies.
Memorial Matter deals with the enigmatic crossovers between earth materials and intertwined temporalities. An extensive historic film archive that reveals the use of industrial technology to extract natural resources as a sign of progress is used by the artists. They disrupt material temporalities using artificial neural networks to transform the progressive imaginaries of the 20th century into materials that refer to a future as distant as the past of the minerals from which they were constructed. A shift from smooth, shiny and symmetrical forms to spaces of friction, imperfection and roughness: digital ruins as architectures of material memory.
The artists' intention lies in the interaction between filmic archival material, digital technologies and organic processes to weave possible paths towards more sustainable futures, as well as to propose digital speculations and the possibilities of making them tangible through the use of recycled and biodegradable materials.
Text: Angel Salazar
Memorial Matter, 2023
Mixed media Installation
Screenprints, gouache on canvas, potato starch
and ash based bioplastics (made in collaboration with Lucía Tieff), ash based 3D printed
sculptures by Tin Wilke, recycled fibers on canvas by Laura Fong Prosper.
Analogue film: 16mm, colour, 4:37 min, loop
Exhibition views of ‘Broken Machines and Wild Imaginings’ in Akademie der Künste, Berlin 2023
16mm Archive Film