Re-writing the machinic anthropocene (2014-2017) [multi-component output with contextualising information]
- Submitting institution
-
Bath Spa University
- Unit of assessment
- 34 - Communication, Cultural and Media Studies, Library and Information Management
- Output identifier
- 3326
- Type
- Q - Digital or visual media
- Publisher
- -
- Month
- -
- Year
- 2017
- URL
-
https://doi.org/10.17870/bathspa.c.4445093.v2
- Supplementary information
-
-
- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- Yes
- Number of additional authors
-
0
- Research group(s)
-
-
- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- Drawn from media arts research approaches, and grounded in theories of ‘hyperobjects’ (Morton, 2013) ‘Re-writing the Machinic Anthropocene’ considers the relations between digitally networked technologies and the earth. It asks three questions: One, how can the field of media art employ speculative fictional methods to expose and rewrite the relationships between digital technologies and the anthropocene? Two, how can such methods bring into view nonhuman voices and perspectives, making theoretical material more operational? Three, how can academic dissemination models be used to highlight these methods and interrogate other innovative approaches within media art research?
The outputs are: a performance lecture, an installation and live ‘spectrogram’, an artist’s book, a symposium, and a special issue of Screenworks journal. Contextual information comprises a documented research timeline and research activities.
The project began with the construction of a fictive research space and research personas. A mapping process traced the technical hyperobject of a smartphone, including the sourcing of raw materials, the production of new forms of waste and the impacts on human and nonhuman. This map was developed into ‘The Signal and the Rock: Proposal for a Film’ (2014-18), an iterative multimedia lecture that exposes and rewrites the hyperobject of a smartphone. A large-scale audio work titled ‘Re-writing the Overcode’ (2017) was then developed and selected for exhibition at Stanley Picker Gallery (2017). This work emerged as an elegy to digital technologies and their relations to the anthropocene, utilising nonhuman voices in its delivery. A subsequent book, ‘The Signal and the Rock’ (2017), expands on earlier methods.
These works enabled Tweed to operate as a form of ‘translation mechanism’, ‘tuning in’ to nonhuman perspectives that reveal complex networks between the digital and the earth. The research contributes new methods to the use of speculative fiction as a critical tool within media art research.
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -
