With the Thing

HD video, stereo sound, duration 5:00.
Premiere in Bioart Society event 23.8.2024.
Voluntary testers are spending time with a strange device that is pulsing. Each of them has their own way of contacting and exploring the device. The testers seem to be unsure of what they are dealing with. The soundtrack consists of a throbbing pulse of the device, with the tempo changing irregularly. The 8-channel video is divided into two screens, each of which is divided into four video fields displaying eight persons simultaneously engaging with the device. The artwork is part of a larger project by artist-researchers Ylirisku and Slotte Dufva exploring the human entanglement with digital devices and digital data. In this project, Ylirisku and Slotte Dufva seek ways of transforming dimensions of more-than-human relationality that typically are difficult to notice or beyond human perception to a form that would be accessible to human senses. Drawing from queering as a praxis, they disturb the habit of treating digitality as an unproblematised human-governed realm separated from organic, bodily life. The device in the video is crafted by the artist-researchers, and it transforms a mixture of human and non-human sourced digital data sequences to a form of beating vibration. The code sequences that the device runs in random order consist of, e.g. human heart rate data, the COVID-19 vaccine statistics in different countries, hit-points of different Pokémon characters, nuclear fallout statistics from the Chernobyl disaster from 1986 in different countries, and CO2-transfer data gathered from a certain pine and a birch tree in Hyytiälä forestry field station. The device, the "thing", becomes a strange actor, questioning the border between the human and non-human, and asking how we relate to otherness.

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