WEDNESDAY, 18 MAY 2016, 20:00 – 22:00

Kommunal Kunst og Teknik – Blågårds Plads 5, 3. sal, 2200 København N

Vi kommer til at tale om ekspeditioner ind i den meget konkrete bagside af det digitale og om det udvidede sanseapparat, denne virkelighed indebærer. Det er vigtigt, det er gratis og du er velkommen.

We’ll be talking about expeditions in to the very concrete dark side of the digital and the expanded sensorial apparatus that this reality entails. It’s important, free and you are welcome.

The talk will be in Danish or English depending on the audience.

A couple of months ago Anu Ramdas and Christian Danielewitz wrote on facebook: “With radioactive dust in the hair and itching eyes, we´ve made our way to the edge of the massive Weikuang Dam (some refer to it as Hell on Earth!), an artificial lake of chemical waste, located on the fringes of the Gobi Desert. We are on a rather nauseating journey to the dark, industrial heart of Inner Mongolia, Anu and I. The epicentre of these wastelands is the city of Baotou and the Bayan Obo mine to the north of the city. This area is by far the world´s largest supplier of Rare Earth Elements; the essential, material basis of our high-tech societies. Cerium, Europium, Thorium, Lanthanum and Neodymium are not exactly familiar names, but these Rare Earths, mined and refined in Baotou, are used in everything from medical technologies to tablets, smartphones, camera lenses, harddrives and even in so-called green technologies (the irony!). That´s right, this huge pool of black, toxic sludge, an environmental disaster stretching as far as the eye can see, is indeed a sinister by-product of the screen, you are looking at right now…”

Jacob Remin recently opened the exhibition “Cloud Computing” at DIAS where he writes: “A special focus is materiality in the digital. While our reality and life is steeped in the digital – from the simplest everyday things to sophisticated technological innovations – the digital is strangely abstract. We can not point to an actual identity or core, but only on technologies, on the machinery that conveys the digital to us. And, if we turn our attention to the machines, their identity and the design is very much tied to geological materials – for the minerals to be extracted to construct components for computers.”