Exhibition by Robin Everett
at Tag Team Studios, Bergen
Opening: 01.09.2023 at 19.00 – 22.00
Exhibition runs from 02.09 – 15.10.2023
Taking the increasingly fetishised fascination with the terraforming and colonisation of Mars as a vehicle, this exhibition of new works by Robin Everett creates spaces that host the (mis)translations and uncanny alchemised interpretations between organic and emergent digital matter.
A host of neural networks, uniquely trained on every text that Everett read surrounding this work, converse with each other, using the language drawn from the wealth of data gathered by the Rover missions, including light values, geologies, and topographies, research surrounding the use of oyster mushrooms as the first tool of terraforming alien worlds, and 1970’s Soviet and contemporary science-fiction epics, amongst other things. This generated script is read in the voice of a multitude of characters all generated from an AI clone of Everett’s voice. The uncanny techno-mimicry narrates us through multi-channel media installation of a world of increasingly compromised ecosystems and infrastructures that we currently live in and into suggestions of industrial extractivist monopolies that populate a future history on either planet.
Bathed in a light installation echoing the values of sunlight on the Red Planet, a collection of 3D printed sculptures are slowly colonised and consumed by oyster mushroom mycelium over the exhibition period. Constructed from thousands of images from NASA’s Mars Rover database through photogrammetry processes, fragments of the surface of Mars have been recovered from the original digitised alien geology and reconstructed here. As the mycelium populates the structures, the digital artefacts from multiple translations are rendered in their own organic interpretations.
A third type of poetic computing arises, seeding the gaps in the meeting points between our real and virtual worlds, our organic and our digital, weaving entanglements between artificial and mycelial networks.
Supported by:
Kulturrådet
Bildende Kunstneres Hjelpefond
Bergen Kommune
