Variations

The focus of this talk will be Variations – an artistic research project by Felicity Hammond that interrogates the meeting places of geological mining and data mining. Over the past two years, Hammond has explored the extractive systems that bind these processes together, inserting herself into the machine that drives contemporary image production. Staged across four chapters and ending in a funeral service for artificial intelligence, Variations maps how digital material makes its way from mineral to pixel, from the subsurface to the screen.

This talk will share the details of each chapter, from the fictional organisation set up to manually classify physical materials as data, to the enactment of model collapse. Hammond will also contextualise these findings with her new commission for Aksioma Project Space, Latent Space, where the proposed afterlife of artificial intelligence lives on in outer-space.