The Infocalypse Stack 22
February 2013 - 23 March 2013
The Infocalypse Stack was an exhibition of work based around a post-apocalyptic narrative.
Survivors of an apocalyptic event, known as the Infocalypse, try to imagine the technological world that came before them through folk art, rituals and fragments of the lost technology.
See posts below for details of the works.
See notes on the ideas behind the exhibition.
Works from The Infocalypse Stack
The Wanton Phreak, The John Shade
Acrylic on paper, projected animation
These animations depict small birds with a geometric object, relating to the idea of organically stored data. The Infocalypse survivors believe that data has been stored in wild animals after the loss of digitally stored information in the fictional disaster that makes up the backdrop to the exhibition. The shapes refer to a depiction of three dimensional data objects, similar to the ideas of virtual reality in 80’s Cyberpunk novels such as William Gibson’s Neuromancer. The survivors believe they can regain this lost information by engaging with nature through ritual behaviour. (see also Data Ritual necklaces)
The paintings displayed make up the frames of the projected animations.
Photographs by Anna Arca
Works from The Infocalypse Stack
Data Ritual necklaces and instruments
Acrylic on Oak veneer board
The necklaces and instruments are ritual objects that symbolise the survivors belief that data has been stored in animals and insects. They hope to be able to access the information that was lost after the disaster by interacting with creatures such as birds and moths through effigies and rituals.
Photographs by Anna Arca
Works from The Infocalypse Stack
Perspex Shrines
Laser cut perspex and Oak veneer board
These pieces depict the events that the survivors believe led up to the Infocalypse, as well as events after. They mark key events of the Infocalypse as perceived by the survivors.
Camp Fire
This depicts the perceived world before the disaster where machines and animals have been uplifted to achieved sentience and levels of intelligence similar to humans.
Neo Kaczynskiite Data Core Battle
The Neo Kaczynskiites are a neo Luddite group who brought about the Infocalypse. Prior to this, mankind had created strong artificial intelligences called Minds. The Minds took over the running of things such as engineering, science and cryptography so humans no longer studied those fields themselves and the ability to do so was lost.
The Neo Kaczynskiites were against this and they attacked and destroyed the Minds causing the information apocalypse. The survivors don’t really know what the Minds were or what they looked like. Here they have depicted a visualisation of the vast amounts of data the Minds had at their disposal as complex pictograms.
Deimatic Display
The survivors believe that before the disaster the Minds, began to store data organically in animals, in an attempt to survive the attacks from the Neo Kaczynskiites. This piece shows an incident where this process went wrong and the octopus has gone berserk and attacked the other animals. The octopus is a symbol for the organic data storage as it represents 8 bits.
The Elephant Hawkmoths
The Elephant Hawkmoths are a nature cult that has developed in the wake of the Infocalypse.
New Oldowan Industry
Oldowan is an archaeological term used to refer to the earliest stone industry in prehistory. The term is taken from the Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania, where the first stone tools were discovered. As a parallel to this prehistoric centre of technological industry, the sculpture depicts a new kind of industry being discovered in the wake of the information disaster. The band of child crystal miners are discovering and experimenting with possible new uses for giant underground crystal formations.
Photographs by Anna Arca
Works from The Infocalypse Stack
Robot arm drawings
Ink drawings by robot arm, painted by the artists.
As part of a continued interest in building apparatus for modifying their style of drawing, the artists worked with robotics expert Ad Spiers to create a robot arm to produce drawings. In the exhibition, the arm takes on the role of a fragment of former technology. The images it makes take the form of imagined creatures from a post-disaster world; rumours of things said to live in nearby woods or inhabitants of distant places.
See our Blog entries about the development of the drawing arm project: 26 Jan, 3 Feb, 2 March.
Photographs by Anna Arca
Appearances of a Cube to a Plane Being
2012
Animation and framed paintings
First shown at Manchester Contemporary
The owl is the symbol of Athena, goddess of, amongst other things, craft. The Ancient Greek word for craft was téchnē, from which we derive the word tecnology - indication a link between craft and technology. The object that the owl flies towards is a hypercube or tesseract - an object that would need four geometric dimensions to exist. The owl, rendered as a three dimensional objects using the tools of craft meets a four dimensional object rendered using technology.
Asteroid works
2012
Shown at Manchester Contemporary
Part of a series of works based on the geology and nomenclature of asteroids.
The first asteroids to be observed were named after characters from ancient Greek mythology. Astraea, Iris and Pallas are small sculptural ‘shrines’ to the asteroids of the same name. There imagery is based on the mythological character after which they are named as well as the astrological symbol and geological composition of each. Vesta is a ‘portrait’ of the asteroid made up of the minerals which comprise its mass.
The pieces are laser cut in perspex, using equipment at the Black County Atelier
The Colour Bright
2012
Site Gallery and Sheffield Children’s Festival
‘The Colour Bright’ is an animation produced in collaboration with schools in the Sheffield and Derbyshire area and the Arts for Health programme at The Children’s Hospital, Sheffield. It was commissioned by Sheffield Children’s Festival. The exhibition as a whole was commissioned by Site Gallery and comprised of the animation, new collaborative paintings and an installation of light-responsive wall drawings.
The source footage for the animation was shot at Creswell Crags, Derbyshire and features torches made by patients at The Children’s Hospital. Pupils at the schools involved painted one frame of the animation each.
The piece imagines a future world in which society and culture have simultaneously evolved and regressed in order to survive a technological disaster. The caves featured in the animation were inhabited by early humans between 43,000 and 10,000 years ago. The caves house the only known examples of British cave art, including engravings on the walls and ceilings of the caves.
The paintings, created in collaboration with pupils at some of the schools involved, depict scenes from the imagined post-disaster world. They feature costumed cultists performing rituals for the vanished technological world, survivors creating a new world for themselves and omens that appear in the sky.
http://www.sheffieldchildrens.nhs.uk
http://www.artsheffield.org
http://www.creswell-crags.org.uk
Gleaners of the Infocalypse
2012
The hand-painted tail section of a BAe 146-200, made into a feral wildlife artists studio and hide.
The piece imagines the aftermath of a global information and technology disaster where the remnants of 21st century society are re-used by the survivors. The title references both Millet’s 1857 painting The Gleaners and Neal Stephenson’s contraction of ‘information’ and ‘apocalypse’ from his 1992 sci-fi novel, Snow Crash.
The aircraft fuselage contains homemade easels and paintings of the local wildlife alongside crash helmets decorated with painted camouflage and deers’ heads, used by the inhabitants to get closer to their subjects.
