Sinking Alloyances + Planetary Burial

 

Sinking Alloyances + Planetary Burial is the ninth entry to the ROCK REPO – an ongoing enquiry into computational, mineral time and matter.

Artist collective The Underground Division (Helen Pritchard, Jara Rocha, Femke Snelting) have created a new audiovisual installation (3D renderings, models, sound and text) presented at the newly transformed Eco Gallery at Wat Tyler Country Park.

Planetary estuary environments are recognised for their capacities to capture and store carbon, known as carbon sequestering. Quantified, measured and commodified as sinks for so-called ‘bluecarbon’, saltmarshes are rendered back into the flows of carbon trade.

This new artwork meditates on what it means to compute the volumes of carbon that are ‘buried’; the microbiomes and topologies, held together by root lattices of cordgrass in estuaries and mangroves across the world. Showing the liveliness and abundance of estuaries that is in excess of capture.

View on-line: http://ddivision.xyz/rockrepo/sinking/ (allow your browser to play sound).

Sound: Shadow Graphs, Katrina Burch aka Yoneda Lemma feat. Ultrasonic Dreams (2020), commissioned by Metal for the Estuary Festival 2021.

+ info about Estuary Festival 2021: https://www.estuaryfestival.com/

The Underground Division at live event with Hackers & Desginers' BodyBuilding: A Platform in Transition

On Wednesday 24th of June Hackers & Designers will launch their online platform, a website dedicated to publishing works from the BodyBuilding exhibition commissioned by Tetem. BodyBuilding was a process-driven exhibition curated by H&D, with the aim to investigate the intersection of technology and the agency of the (human, post-human, non-human) body from a maker's perspective. The physical and interactive structure, through which visitors were able to move, view, experience, and interact with the different artworks was on view only for a short duration due to the outbreak of COVID-19.

Join us on 24 June at 19.30 on the self-built streaming platform by H&D for a conversation with The Underground Division (Helen Pritchard, Femke Snelting and Jara Rocha) about their work ROCK REPO - questioning inhuman materialities and how they matter [in] the world, the crushing exploitations and extractions of normative 3D processes of geocomputation, and the act of translating between the 'physical' and the 'digital'. In addition to our conversations, we'll also listen together to a sound recording of 'Ultrasonic dreams of aclinical renderings' by The Underground Division and have a talk by Anja Groten on the notion of the platform and platformization. The audience will be able to join in the conversation via the chat.

With this website launch, and accompanying online event, H&D aims to translate the physical installation at Tetem into a digital space, taking the occasion to discuss digital platforms and hosting initiatives that currently gain a lot of attention. The event will pay attention to self-hosted video streaming and live video chat possibilities, as well as less conventional formats for online encounter, and invites the audience to join the discussion about the importance of challenging proprietary, commercial platforms such as Zoom, Teams and Google Hangouts that exploitat users' reliances on communication infrastructures in times of crisis.

Link to the live event and platform: https://live.hackersanddesigners.nl/

Spread the word and join the conversation!

More info:
https://bit.ly/2BiLOhU

BodyBuilding: ROCK REPO

The Underground Division (Helen Pritchard, Femke Snelting, and Jara Rocha) contributes to BodyBuilding, an exhibition curated by Hackers & Designers @ Tetem, Enschede. Opening 20 February 2020.

Change detection based on LiDAR data. In: Hutchinson, D. Jean, Matthew Lato, Dave Gauthier, Ryan Kromer, Matthew Ondercin, Megan van Veen, and Rob Harrap. “Applications of remote sensing techniques to managing rock slope instability risk.” In Canadian Geotechnical Conference, Quebec City, pp. 20-23. 2015.

 

 

 

 

 

ROCK REPO

The ROCK REPO is a device built by a team of trans*feminist post-normal scientists for thinking with rock. Managing rock slope instabilities by LiDAR, optimising strata modelling for fracking, rendering cavities in 3D for gaming, and algorithmically smoothed rock shaders are all deposited in the REPO. The REPO inquires into these banal, exquisite, kitsch, static, carbonivourous figurations to fracture the normative 3D processes of geocomputation and their crushing exploitations and extractions.

Through making a collection of ROCKS, The Underground Division gets close to particular ROCKS and their unstable stories, as told through scientific and technological practice. Recognising that rocks have their own lively forces, the unruly team studies rocks’ 3D imaginings, the softwares and hardwares that rocks intervene on and builds new glossaries on the go. Their studies operate as a chipping away at what limits the resistant and destructive capacities of rocks.The ROCK REPO device crosscuts with rocks as ‘bodies’ in a purposeful move away from the somatic corporealities of individual humans. This shift allows the team to ask about inhuman materialities and how they matter [in] the world.

The REPO is an inquiry into what ROCK is, what it could be and the ways in which ROCK is seen or considered as an entity separate from its environment. It works with the ‘deep implicancies’* of this moving between figure and ground, asking what happens as result of this cut, and what other formations could appear. Sharpened by queer and anticolonial sensibilities, investigates the way ROCKS are quarried, measured, quantified, historicized, visualized, predicted, classified, modelled. The REPO as an instrument itself crystallizes other stories of spatial and temporal geologic processes and throws rocks through the glaciated windows of turbocapitalism.

* A term Denise Fereira Da Silva and Arjuna Neuman borrow from forensic genetics to talk about implications and entanglement in a non-linear way.

Also contributing: Kiki Mager and Nazanin Karimi. In collaboration with architect and designer Thomas Rustemeyer, H&D has developed an interactive exhibition structure which will host the works and invite you to actively participate in the (de) constructing the works.

+info: https://tetem.nl/event/bodybuilding/