An Archive of Witch Fever

on view at slash art gallery in San Francisco, Sept 14-Dec14 2024 https://www.slashart.org/fictions-of-presence/

2023

mixed media (fabric, clay, stainless steel conductive thread, human hair, fermenting indigo), dimensions variable

Photos courtesy of slash art gallery

Sensing hardware device design & fabrication: David Rios

What forms of technology and computation will survive the salt water of the ocean, the salt water of our tears? For this piece, through textiles patterned with a speculative botany and conductive thread nets and embroidery, I explore intimate geographies and the practice of queer computation as a mode of survival and world making despite imperial science and its residue. There is a vessel to tune in: human hair and conductive fishing nets that transmit songs and story through AM radio. Its counterpart: imperial science that makes models and diagrams to be the entire world, relying on expeditions, collecting and cataloguing. On the ground, clothing from oceanic passages and migration, patterned with a speculative botany created using machine learning from British botanical illustrations and archival images of trans-Pacific plantations in the 1900s. The conductive thread embroidery is magnetized and encoded with binary information, as a form of embodied, soft data storage. An archive as practice for the future and forgetting, waves of information and waves of migration, electromagnetic waves that pass through us, waves that we absorb, waves that we transmit.