Saturday 21st May
17:30 Doors
18:00-19:00 ‘SL_genCore’ by Pietro Bardini [Live A/V installation]
19:00-19:45 Screenings
‘weapons of mass redemption’ by A N A K H E M I A [Premiere, commissioned by IKLECTIK]
‘Beginningless Mind’ by Marija Bozinovska Jones
19:45-21:30 xname [DJ set]
21:30-22:00 Jung An Tagen + Rainer Kohlberger [Live A/V]
Break
22:30-23:00 Roly Porter + Endless Prowl [Live A/V]
(Bar open until 11:30pm)
Sunday 29th May
15:30 Doors
15:30-16:30 ‘SL_genCore’ by Pietro Bardini [Live A/V installation]
16:30 – 17:00 Screenings
‘Museum of (W)Earkind’ & ‘The Emergence of Fossilised Sound’ by Susan Atwill
‘Selachimorpha’ & ‘Semelparous’ by Joey Holder
17:00-18:30 Panel Discussion + Q&A
‘Fashion, Faith, and Fantasy in the New Art of the Universe’ with Marija Bozinovska Jones, Jake Elwes & A N A K H E M I A [moderated by Terry Tyldesley]
18:30-20:15 JQ [DJ set]
20:15-21:00 Joshua Sabin [Live]
Break
21:15-21:45 ecolagbohrsac2021 [Live A/V]
Break
22:00-22:30 Ziúr [Live]
End
‘Weapons of Mass Redemption’ by A N A K H E M I A
Rose14 is a dream hacker from dimension P36, recruiting human entities for special inter-galactic missions.
During a recruitment session for a black project called ‘AquaMarine’ exploring themes known to affect the course of life of a human on Planet Earth, she dropped into limbo due to a hardware malfunction, losing all sense of cognizance between dreams and reality.
But, within the experience of perception between Dreams and Reality lies the very code to unlock the limbo and awaken fully.
Will Rose14 find it, or will she not?
Will they awaken, or continue dreaming . . . . ?
‘SL_genCore’ by Pietro Bardini
SL_genCore is a live A/V installation. It shows an ever-growing, tentacular path shaped by the movements of a genetic algorithm fed with real-time solar wind data.
The processes that create this virtual path mirror those of the sunken lanes — routes eroded deep into the bedrock by centuries of human, vehicular and animal movements.
The structure that slowly emerges is the trace of SL_genCore ‘s internal activities.
‘Beginningless Mind’ by Marija Bozinovska Jones
Beginningless Mind is a three-fold audio-visual narrative that interacted in real time with search engines using natural language processing (a subfield of AI) to decipher today’s ordering of knowledge. Featuring music score composed by 33EMYBW and J.G. Biberkopf (Gediminas Zygus) and software developed by Jayson Haebich, the work examines the flowing process of interconnectedness.
The audiovisual trilogy observes a (post)colonial symbiosis of nature and culture through Wikipedia as knowledge commons. It follows life on Earth as energy and information unwinding the cosmic law from order to disorder, where the earthling is the youngest, yet most detrimental species. Scalable timeframes explored earthy life from its early imaginings to live satellite imaging.
The worldmaking produced by remote sensing of scientific apparatus is queered with ancient systems of beliefs. The threefold narrative considered planetary kinship as a visceral sense of interconnectedness grounded in terrestrial breathing patterns and how other ecosystems’ (animals, plants, earth elements) breath is mirrored in our own.
‘Museum of (W)Earkind’ by Susan Atwill
The Emergence of Fossilised Sound is currently housed on the second floor of the Museum of (W)Earkind. Wear rhymes with Ear. The underground chamber wall is a form of limestone and fluorospar found only in Weardale. This aural spectacle takes place every evening, the fossilised sounds summoned by the light and movement of the coal miners’ Davey lamps.
‘Selachimorpha’ & ‘Semelparous’ by Joey Holder
Commissioned for Conspiracy Week at The Photographers Gallery (Media Wall), Joey Holder takes a particular scene from the 1975 film Jaws to look at the ways in which manipulated images are appropriated and circulated by Internet culture as ‘fact’.
The scene, which shows a shooting star flaring behind hero Roy Schneider, has become fodder for conspiracy theories. The ease of ‘adapting’ and then distributing images – such as deserts, outer space and oceans – offers a rich breeding ground for the fictional and make believe. Taking its name from a scientific classification for sharks, this project morphs between factual and fictional images, symbols and memes; exposing the continually shifting belief systems we use to define our world.
‘Semelparous’ characterises a species that undertakes a single reproductive episode before death. A unique and generative strategy in which the organism inputs all available resources into maximising reproduction at the expense of future life. Each autumn, European Eels leave their freshwater river homes and migrate more than 3,000 miles across the Atlantic Ocean, to the bottom of the Sargasso Sea, to breed for a single time. The eels’ reproductive life has eluded scientists and philosophers for centuries, as humans have never witnessed nor recorded their spawning rituals.Semelparous revolves around Holder’s newest video work, situated within a complex physical structure, the eel is depicted as a mythological symbol, biological specimen, and it’s most controversial role: food. Unable to replicate the species enigmatic reproductive life in captivity, young European Eels have been extracted and illegally trafficked to farms throughout various regions of Eastern Asia. These practices have severely impacted the populations, and as of 2011, the European Eel has remained critically endangered.
Responding to the eels population crisis, spawning migration, and structural characteristics of the Springhealth pool, Semelparous is a monument to the European Eel. Sculptural elements are extended from the existing architecture as plants and organic materials spill out from the skylights overhead to the depths of the pool. Through its immersive nature and biological sources, Semelparous speculates on our inability to replicate the encoded phenomenon present within an organism’s biological makeup.
‘Emergence Collapse’ by Jung An Tagen + Rainer Kohlberger
Austrian-born, Berlin-based artist and filmmaker Rainer Kohlberger and Viennese producer Jung An Tagen are partners in audiovisual chaos for Emergence Collapse, a new collaborative project adapted from the artists’ forthcoming live AV show. Postponed due to the pandemic, the show was developed from Jung An Tagen’s latest album, Emergent Properties, the first release on ETAT, the producer’s new net label which focuses on “dissociative, psychoacoustic, computer music.” Functioning as an extended exploration of the neuroscientific effects of synthetic sounds, the album’s compositions are equal parts dizzying and ecstatic, oscillating between satisfying and frightening, concrete and abstract, as Shilla Strelka describes in the album’s liner notes, “an overstimulated exploration of perceptive processes.” It’s an effect that is stretched to breaking point with Rainer Kohlberger’s visual accompaniment, a swirling, swarming mass of neural nets and machine learning, a Deep Mind fever dream that draws out the lysergic energy of Jung An Tagen’s synthetic experiments while at the same time gurgles towards the bioluminescent, organic qualities his sounds occasionally assume. It’s a perfect visual representation of being confronted with Jung An Tagen’s productions: impossible to follow, completely overwhelming and resolutely uncanny. Visual cues and sonic forms resolve and dissolve, suggesting familiarity while hinting at sublime computational complexity that’s enough to plunge even the most adventurous listener into a deeply existential place. Emergence Collapse is adapted from the album Emergent Properties, which is out now on ETAT.
