#the infocalypse stack

Petaflops in the cold.

In the background narrative to our The Infocalypse Stack exhibition, the survivors of the apocalyptic disaster believe that the Infocalypse occurred because the Artificial Intelligences that were running the world were attacked by a neo luddite group, called the Neo-Kaczynskiites. 

  We wanted to give the sense that the survivors were trying to piece together the world that had been destroyed in the disaster by gleaning scraps of information from fragments of technology that remained.

  One of their beliefs is the idea of The Minds, advanced AI's that mankind had developed to run things. They believe that their forebears had developed this kind of advanced technology and had entrusted it with the day to day decisions that running the world entails. The Minds had a world wide network of installations and sensors and were capable of building new versions of themselves and making improvements in their design. One of these improvements was to move their processors off-world to asteroids, where the cold of space would cool them and allow for faster computational cycles. This belief gives rise to the use of asteroid imagery in the survivors 'folk art' - the artwork that we made for the exhibition.

The holders we made for the Data Ritual necklace pieces (above) are based on the astrological symbol for the asteroid Pallas.

We have been interested in the discovery and naming of asteroids for a while. The first asteroids to be observed, at the beginning of the 1800's,  were given names from ancient Greek mythology. We drew upon these names as well as the geological  composition of the asteroids to create a small series of works, one of which is pictured below, from 2012. More images and information can be seen here.

The idea of computer processors being housed in space on asteroids and other bodies is explored in the story 'I Row-Boat' by Cory Doctorow. The story deals with sentient AI, uplifted life forms and a kind of internet distributed throughout the solar system.

Visual Data Structures.

William Gibson's 1984 Cyberpunk novel Neuromancer describes a kind of virtual reality internet called the Matrix. The protagonists enter and navigate their way around a landscape of largely geometric representations of data, such as 'corporate data cores', and physically attack and breach these structures in order to access the data inside. The image at the top is from the Neuromancer computer game. The sceenshot goes some way to visualising the Matrix of the novel.

Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash also depicts an immersive 'internet' called the Metaverse. Written in 1992, it describes the Metaverse as something like an advanced Second Life where users control avatars to navigate a long street lined with buildings that are analogous with websites, each with a different purpose. Some of the functions and inner workings of the Metaverse are described as connections of pipes, tubes and geometric objects in a kind of machinery layout.

See other related images: 3.14159265,

Neuromancer Gameplay video

In our recent series of artworks, see paintings above, we were interested in exploring this type of visualisation of data objects. The narrative behind our exhibition The Infocalypse Stack at Ceri Hand Gallery was a post-apocalyptic scenario in which the survivors try to understand the technological world that came before the disaster. The survivors believe that the world before was run by advanced Artificial Intelligences. These AI's were attacked by a Neo Luddite group. The survivors believe that the AI's tried to save their data from destruction by experimenting in organic data storage. The survivors imagine these data structures as geometric objects carried in the minds of animals and birds. They hope to regain the lost data of the destroyed technological world by ritually communing with nature.

The artworks take the form of hand painted animations, with the individual frames of the animations displayed alongside the video projection. See also Data Ritual necklaces from the same exhibition, which share some of these ideas.