Modular Extractions, 2022.

A piece on processes of extraction

RealBodies - Ingrid @ Corsica Studios

Description of the club night - ‘Clubs are refracted spaces, experienced by their visitors as serving a spectrum of functions. They are places to converge and meld bodies into dance monstrosities. They are the site of introspection, of a mindful hedonism, for an individual alone in a smoking area. Or else they are safe spaces, a room in which to comfortably self destruct.

In-grid collective gathers a group of artists, musicians and creative technologists to share work about the transmutational potential of the club venue. In-grid.RealBodies is an evening which takes advantage of the multiplicity of Corsica Studios, a respected venue in London’s Elephant and Castle.’ Link to the event ticket page here

Modular Extractions is a collaborative augmented reality piece, delving into modular pipelines, the ethos of "more" and the physical consequences and by-products of AI. Inspired by diagrams from Kate Crawford's Atlas of AI, the work speculates on her figuring of AI frameworks to imagine dynamics beyond these extractive pipelines. The work itself creates new nodes from animated scenes in Blender, forming a speculative infrastructure of playful methods to process our technological gloop (data). Surrounding the creation were conversations of human labour hidden by the clean white ethereal aesthetic of AI and cloud technologies, these thoughts focused the project on interpretation, intervention, and reformation.
In the original work generative selections of AR markers drew the models from static symbols behind the desktop screen to something slightly more tangible. Trapped between worlds, the markers move and settle in random patterns, each cycle creating a new formation of the pipeline. Through this generative mindset one can alter the looking for 'more', (seen in the war against Ukraine, the space race to mars etc.) to one of reuse and creativity, utilising what we have on this planet and in our local environments.

Documentation of the process and the night