Epicentres.
Epicentres consists of a series of exhibited prints and a book publication of internet-based images. It explores how large-scale data-gathering infrastructures remotely augment and construct human experience. Prints were exhibited at the Northern Light group exhibition held at SIA Gallery, Sheffield, in July 2016. The book was published in 2015 by Guerrilla Writers, in the ‘The Editions’ series (general editor Sharon Kivland) and disseminated at events at Holden Gallery, Manchester; Whitechapel Gallery, London; Liverpool Central Library, Liverpool; The Tetley, Leeds; and The Hepworth, Wakefield.
- Submitting institution
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Staffordshire University
- Unit of assessment
- 32 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
- Output identifier
- Lists 20
- Type
- L - Artefact
- Location
- SIA Gallery, Sheffield; Holden Gallery, Manchester; Whitechapel Gallery, London; Liverpool Central Library, Liverpool; The Tetley, Leeds; The Hepworth, Wakefield
- Open access status
- -
- Month of production
- -
- Year of production
- 2015
- URL
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- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
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- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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0
- Research group(s)
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A - The C3 Centre: Creative Industries and Creative Communities
- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- Epicentres contributes to a wider enquiry into how web-to-print works that use screen capture, image grab, site scrape, and search queries can ask pertinent, critically grounded questions of the material relations involved in digitally mediated experiences. Epicentres redeploys imagery generated by the United States Geological Service’s automated earthquake sensing system. It appropriates copyright-free material from the Service’s real-time earthquake alert system (usgs.gov/natural-hazards/earthquake-hazards/monitoring). The artwork compiles cropped versions of automatically generated maps, which show the location of earthquakes in remote areas of Alaska. It uses a conceptualist strategy of appropriation, re-presenting data as a pointer to the underlying values and perspectives involved in its collection. The cropping removes any information that allows the images to be decoded as data, instead inviting an aesthetic encounter that decontextualizes and defamiliarizes them. The only way to experience these remote, low-intensity earthquakes is as automated images generated from sensor data, with no guarantee that the images themselves will receive a human viewing. The data-gathering apparatus determines what constitutes a seismological event to be noticed, effectively paying attention on our behalf. The images were edited to emphasize their utilitarian aesthetic qualities. The subsequent diagrammatic forms overtly resist interpretation as physical phenomena without training in the use of the digital technologies. The images, as presented within the photographic exhibition, further juxtapose the idea of training-as-augmentation against photographic training and theory. Both book and exhibition then showed how web-derived artworks can invite a reconsideration of how digital sensing infrastructures, and formal training in them, redraw the boundaries of human physical perception.
- Author contribution statement
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- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -
