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APR 2024

Entangled Others

specious upwellings

4 artworks

ARTXCODE

This series exists as part of an ongoing study concerning questions of entanglement, and how all that surrounds us interacts ceaselessly in one form or another. The initial culmination of these experiments involved multiple years of exploration and multi-disciplinary collaboration which took the form of the work decohering delineation (2022-2023), a tentative attempt at making tangible the innate interconnection of all that we tend to assume as distinct, clearly delimited forms of life, ecosystems, etc. Normally, image-making in the context of digital, generative systems arguably defaults to the role of the subject as an initial input such as data, or observationally determined rulesets which are typical examples of this. Whilst the results are naturally striking, the role of subject risks passivity, or a degradation from existing as an equal presence when included primarily as an aesthetic raw material. Addressing this particular framing is a non-trivial endeavour, however, we wanted to explore how we might consider certain technologies as conceptually useful means to sketch out stepping stones to alternative approaches to shared image-making as artists. To this end we desired to inject the now mundane approach of dataset → model → output wherein dataset was the total of influence from the subject in question, with an iterative interaction where the subject intervenes in the decision-making process of generation, one that would leave its decisive traces upon the final work itself. In this case, the subject of this branch of tireless aquatic fascination, namely the phenomena of oceanic upwellings. An upwelling is a surge of cold, nutrient rich water, from the depths of the ocean. This water is crucial to nurturing a dizzying variety of oceanic biodiversity and many terrestrial denizens that depend on it for sustenance. Yet its cyclical motions are at a scale too vast and gradual for us to perceive directly. Instead we must contend with allowing the knowledge of such phenomena to enrich our only interface to it: the life we encounter in underwater excursions, imagery of which inspired and shaped the works in this series. We decided to have each individual work be a diptych consisting of a monochrome-colour pair. While depicting the same result, they offer two very different readings of the same image. This is our attempt at trying to convey the tension we encountered in depicting something that exists at a scale far too vast for the body to experience directly in any meaningful manner. Entangled Others

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FEB 2023

Entangled Others

Intertidal Samples

64 artworks

The continuum of what we sample stretches beyond the realm of the fathomable, yet even when we extract but a single drop of water, we find within it entire ecosystems of life and interactions. It's tempting to view each drop as a world, contained beautifully by surface tensions. Yet, when given the chance, even the smallest ecosystem will naturally merge with any other body of liquid, erasing and re-writing the depth and composition of the life within. This series acts as a multitude of samples drawn from the same intertidal zone of artificial life, deceptively singular and delimited, patiently awaiting the chance to diffuse into something greater.

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NOV 2022

Entangled Others

three moments of terrestrial mimicry

Unique

How do we negotiate the appearance of similarity, yet fundamental difference in function and context? With our frame of experience being decidedly terrestrial, it’s too easy to project into other contexts, such as the aquatic, qualities based upon their appearance, in turn creating a new ecosystem of projected references and associations. This artificial veil on our perception is a never-ending surface that we can strive to make porous and permeable to our senses, but only if we can at first learn to see these constructions that decorate it.

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Entangled Others

three records of suspended florescence

10 editions

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Entangled Others

three states of imitated desiccation

72 editions

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AUG 2022

Entangled Others

random access pond - analog

34 editions

"The reality of our mundane life is that these two layers of reality are in fact tightly interwoven, constantly influencing, interacting, shaping & reshaping, consuming and acting. Our inherited bias towards seeing the man-made, or artificial, as different from the natural world further obscures this reality where digital agents (software & hardware) behave and interact as an ecosystem, also with the natural world. As a way of engaging with this, we took our starting point in examining the benchmark datasets that are typically used to evaluate the performance and accuracy of neural network architectures, the most well-known of these being Imagenet. These datasets very much are an attempt at gathering what we would consider a usefully representative slice of our modern (western) mundane reality, the categories being things we would typically find relevant to recognise in a day-to-day context such as cars, dogs, buildings, people, toasters and so on. Naturally current neural networks have become eerily good at not only recognising but also generating synthetic examples of these mundane categories. By using these pre-trained 'mundane' models that can only recreate from the data that they were trained upon, we began a process of prompting, manipulating and stretching these networks in order to create speculative representations of the entangled reality of the digital & physical. Exploring how we can stretch our imagination so as to see a world of harmoniously interacting artificial and natural life as one single, sustainable ecosystem, starting from the day-to-day frame of reference. Two works in this exhibition are cyanotypes - one of the oldest photographic printing processes. I find Anna Atkins work from 1843 deeply inspiring because she was discovering the use of new technology to document the natural way in a way that hadn’t been done before, especially when the most prevalent way of documenting back then was writing and drawing." - Feileacan McCormick and Sofia Crespo. Previous exhibitions: 2022 MoCDA The Foundry artists in residency, 2022 GARDENING Amelisweerd, 2021 ZER0|1NE II MMXXI (IL), 2021 Aiiiii: The Book of Sand (CN), 2021 Fiber Festival (NL), 2021 Terrain Offline (IN) A randomly selected collector will receive a physical cyanotype of the artwork.

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Entangled Others

dawn sensors

Unique

"The reality of our mundane life is that these two layers of reality are in fact tightly interwoven, constantly influencing, interacting, shaping & reshaping, consuming and acting. Our inherited bias towards seeing the man-made, or artificial, as different from the natural world further obscures this reality where digital agents (software & hardware) behave and interact as an ecosystem, also with the natural world. As a way of engaging with this, we took our starting point in examining the benchmark datasets that are typically used to evaluate the performance and accuracy of neural network architectures, the most well-known of these being Imagenet. These datasets very much are an attempt at gathering what we would consider a usefully representative slice of our modern (western) mundane reality, the categories being things we would typically find relevant to recognise in a day-to-day context such as cars, dogs, buildings, people, toasters and so on. Naturally current neural networks have become eerily good at not only recognising but also generating synthetic examples of these mundane categories. By using these pre-trained 'mundane' models that can only recreate from the data that they were trained upon, we began a process of prompting, manipulating and stretching these networks in order to create speculative representations of the entangled reality of the digital & physical. Exploring how we can stretch our imagination so as to see a world of harmoniously interacting artificial and natural life as one single, sustainable ecosystem, starting from the day-to-day frame of reference." - Feileacan McCormick and Sofia Crespo. Previous exhibitions: 2022 MoCDA The Foundry artists in residency, 2022 GARDENING Amelisweerd, 2021 ZER0|1NE II MMXXI (IL), 2021 Aiiiii: The Book of Sand (CN), 2021 Fiber Festival (NL), 2021 Terrain Offline (IN) The collector will receive a physical print of the artwork.

View series

Entangled Others

dawn sensors analog

10 editions

"The reality of our mundane life is that these two layers of reality are in fact tightly interwoven, constantly influencing, interacting, shaping & reshaping, consuming and acting. Our inherited bias towards seeing the man-made, or artificial, as different from the natural world further obscures this reality where digital agents (software & hardware) behave and interact as an ecosystem, also with the natural world. As a way of engaging with this, we took our starting point in examining the benchmark datasets that are typically used to evaluate the performance and accuracy of neural network architectures, the most well-known of these being Imagenet. These datasets very much are an attempt at gathering what we would consider a usefully representative slice of our modern (western) mundane reality, the categories being things we would typically find relevant to recognise in a day-to-day context such as cars, dogs, buildings, people, toasters and so on. Naturally current neural networks have become eerily good at not only recognising but also generating synthetic examples of these mundane categories. By using these pre-trained "mundane" models that can only recreate from the data that they were trained upon, we began a process of prompting, manipulating and stretching these networks in order to create speculative representations of the entangled reality of the digital & physical. Exploring how we can stretch our imagination so as to see a world of harmoniously interacting artificial and natural life as one single, sustainable ecosystem, starting from the day-to-day frame of reference. Two works in this exhibition are cyanotypes - one of the oldest photographic printing processes. I find Anna Atkins work from 1843 deeply inspiring because she was discovering the use of new technology to document the natural way in a way that hadn’t been done before, especially when the most prevalent way of documenting back then was writing and drawing." - Feileacan McCormick and Sofia Crespo. Previous exhibitions: 2022 MoCDA The Foundry artists in residency, 2022 GARDENING Amelisweerd, 2021 ZER0|1NE II MMXXI (IL), 2021 Aiiiii: The Book of Sand (CN), 2021 Fiber Festival (NL), 2021 Terrain Offline (IN)

View series

AUG 2022

Entangled Others

random access pond

Unique

"The reality of our mundane life is that these two layers of reality are in fact tightly interwoven, constantly influencing, interacting, shaping & reshaping, consuming and acting. Our inherited bias towards seeing the man-made, or artificial, as different from the natural world further obscures this reality where digital agents (software & hardware) behave and interact as an ecosystem, also with the natural world. As a way of engaging with this, we took our starting point in examining the benchmark datasets that are typically used to evaluate the performance and accuracy of neural network architectures, the most well-known of these being Imagenet. These datasets very much are an attempt at gathering what we would consider a usefully representative slice of our modern (western) mundane reality, the categories being things we would typically find relevant to recognise in a day-to-day context such as cars, dogs, buildings, people, toasters and so on. Naturally current neural networks have become eerily good at not only recognising but also generating synthetic examples of these mundane categories. By using these pre-trained 'mundane' models that can only recreate from the data that they were trained upon, we began a process of prompting, manipulating and stretching these networks in order to create speculative representations of the entangled reality of the digital & physical. Exploring how we can stretch our imagination so as to see a world of harmoniously interacting artificial and natural life as one single, sustainable ecosystem, starting from the day-to-day frame of reference." - Feileacan McCormick and Sofia Crespo. Previous exhibitions: 2022 MoCDA The Foundry artists in residency, 2022 GARDENING Amelisweerd, 2021 ZER0|1NE II MMXXI (IL), 2021 Aiiiii: The Book of Sand (CN), 2021 Fiber Festival (NL), 2021 Terrain Offline (IN)

View series