3 megabytes of hot RAM
2011
The exhibition title ‘3 Megabytes of Hot RAM’ is taken from William Gibson’s 1984 novel Neuromancer and sets the tone of the exhibition - incorporating desire, nostalgia, failure and loss, despite the fact it refers to the future.
The centrepiece of the exhibition is Data Haven, a suspended mass of computers, data storage and monitors in the form of an inscrutable face. A ‘data haven’ is a secure, unregulated place for storing data beyond the reach of government or corporations. These storage spaces imply freedom fighters, libertarians, criminals, and hackers.
TOP500 is a series of new watercolours depicting the ten fastest supercomputers existing in the world today. The ‘TOP500 project’ ranks and details the fastest supercomputers, with the makers of these computers giving their machines romantic or naturalistic names such as ‘Jaguar’ or ‘Cielo’ (Spanish for sky or heaven). The paintings take the form of a series of logos that each attempt to explain the function and history of the supercomputers they represent. Each supercomputer is researched by one of the Juneau Projects, who works up an emblem idea and explains it verbally to the other Juneau Projects member who, without reference to the actual supercomputer or the context for the emblem’s imagery, creates and paints their own version of the design. This process of translation creates a system of information transfer, existing between two people rather than the circuits of a computer.
Other works in the exhibition include a series of unique bleach-etched digital photographic prints that reflect upon mortality and obsolescence in relation to technology, and a series of new abstract landscape paintings produced using robotic arms. These paintings are made outdoors, using a laptop and mouse to control the robot arm directly, (rather than programming it). Despite its’ sophistication, the arm and the computer mediate the movements of the artist, turning the attempted landscape painting into an abstract series of colour bands. The paintings are held by the robot arm which painted the image.
