Machinic Paragenesis

(Artwork). Video, animation, audio-generated 3D printed sculpture, laser etched acrylic, aluminium, construction materials, field recordings (electromagnetic frequencies and sub-AM radio waves.

Machinic Paragenesis presents an experiment in coalescing the emancipatory potential of site/time specific ephemeral noise as a creative tool for mapping the tensions between capital industry and ecological organisation.
A camera, zoom recording device, EMF (electromagnetic field) recording device, sub-AM radio wave recording device, and contact microphones were used to collect footage, audible sounds and invisible frequencies naked to the human ear from three automated logistics centres located on the outskirts of Taipei. All three labour sites deploy swarm technologies (hive-minded networks of robotic vehicles that organise, and delegate tasks based on principles of swarm intelligence found in social insect colonies) as a means of completing logistics work. This is a partnership that is fraught with harmonies and hostilities yet is necessitated by the economic nature of swarming and neoliberalism as frameworks for outwards and upwards mobility (respectively) and growth, which lead to economies of scale.
Operating as an audio-visual scaffolding, the footage and field recordings were channelled into a multimedia body of work that endeavours to chart the trajectory of noise that currently functions as a chaotic material, a disruptive, inconsequential or anarchic signal that adds nothing to the net-productivity of an otherwise highly efficient warehouse logistics operation. Whilst this experiment is interested in the streamlined efficiency of automated logistics and social insect swarming, it places a particular focus on energy that is lost – the seemingly wasteful expenditure that emanates outwards as a non-recuperable byproduct of the labour process. Driven by concepts of systems theory and general economy, machinic paragenesis attempts to enact a methodology whereby undesirable noise is caught and dragged back into the production chain. Despite its transgressive aesthetics, this exercise of noise-recycling (or rather, noise- fetishisation) offers a framework for transforming noise back into productive information so to render it legible. In other words, it forces an order upon a chaoitic formlessness – re-meshing an excessive luxury into a profitable necessity, ready for market consumption. The exhibition acts as an imagination of this market.
This imperfect methodology is one that produces an unsure outcome. On one-hand, it can be recognised as a DIY experiment in guerrilla field recording and video art-making that amounts to both an exposition of capitalism’s definitive exploitation of the natural world, and the generative potential of noise as an artistic material for charting complex tensions particular to our late-capitalist reality. On the other-hand, the project ironically drags noise back into the meat-grinder, commodifying the emancipated remnants of a labour built upon harvested bio-organisation and amounting to a diminution of the liberatory potential of noise in production systems. The experiment produced a paradoxical outcome, in which product and byproduct, luxury and necessity, repetition and difference are blurred, confused and hybridised.

The project also includes an improvisational “score” that is performed live by two people. It has been performed in Walyalup with Jimi DePriest (Current Gallery, 2023) and in Taipei with Chloe Lin (Waley Art, 2024). These performances have involved using live “talk-back” radio broadcast with ant colony field recordings, electric guitar, lyre, theramin and pipa.

Emerging from this exercise of scavenging for the accursed share of sporadic noise is the construction of a larger, speculative abstraction of complex tensions that exists between swarming and capitalism – two systems of organising nature and labour.

Exhibition history:
2023: "Tickle, Sense" - group exhibition at Treasure Hill Artist Village (Taipei, Taiwan).
2023: "Machinic Paragenesis" - solo exhibition at Current Gallery (Walyalup, Australia).
2024: "Put Em in a Box #3" - group exhibition at Waley Art curated by Shih Ya Tien (Taipei, Taiwan).

This record, and its DOI, represent metadata of the work available at the publisher website, which is listed under “Access to Document”