3D video (Unreal Engine, Unity), AI video (Stable Diffusion); object, wood, 3D print, PLA
Insider is a multi-episode dystopian science & theory fiction tale of evolving forms of awareness of matter and elements (oil, silicon, data, toxins, volcanoes, concrete).
Episode II tells the story of an evolving form of awareness developed from the combined relics of the many selves left behind by non-human and human beings who used to inhabit the Earth. In order to survive, they blend into an ethereal molecule, an anomaly functioning in planetary post-apocalyptic debris, the only living being on the globe. Once immersed in the narrative, we enter a non-anthropocentric perspective of curios – the main non-human protagonist of the episode.
The Insider series was inspired by Pliny the Younger’s account of the eruption of Mount Vesuvius (79 A.D.): “The rising cloud resembled a tree (arbor), its general appearance can best be expressed as being like an umbrella pine (pinus) which rose to a great height”. The description of the incident becomes an open portal allowing journeys which – if spacetime were to be transcended – would make it possible to record the final moments of multiple worlds, both real and speculative. Pliny wrote:
We had scarcely sat down to rest when darkness fell, not the dark of a moonless or cloudy night, but as if the lamp had been put out in a closed room.
At last the darkness thinned and dispersed into smoke or cloud; then there was genuine daylight, and the sun actually shone out, but yellowish as it is during an eclipse. We were terrified to see everything changed, buried deep in ashes like snowdrifts.
A gleam of light returned, but we took this to be a warning of the approaching flames rather than daylight. However, the flames remained some distance off; then darkness came on once more and ashes began to fall again, this time in heavy showers. We rose from time to time and shook them off, otherwise we should have been buried and crushed beneath their weight. I could boast that not a groan or cry of fear escaped me in these perils, but I admit that I derived some poor consolation in my mortal lot from the belief that the whole world was dying with me and I with it.
The thickening of data, filling Earth’s surface RAM for years, causes eruption. Yet before it happens, the Earth and its ecosystems attempt to handle information and biological overcapacity, reduce the harmful outcomes of human activity. Yet there comes a time when volumes of existing data, active processes, circulating biochemical waste and contamination suspended in the atmosphere become too vast for the Earth’s memory to accommodate. The human species perishes in an apocalyptic explosion. The planet breeds an anomaly, a new form of post-collective awareness…
PREVIOUS EPISODES: INSIDER. The Prologue: The rising cloud resembled a tree (arbor), its general appearance can best be expressed as being like an umbrella pine (pinus) which rose to a great height was presented as an audiovisual performance at the SLUG Gallery in Leipzig (2021/2022), and the Queer S_P_I_T Festival in Vienna (2022); it also aired on Radio Kapitał (2021, 2022) https://radiokapital.pl/ shows/insider. Insider I: Geotrauma was shown at the Zachęta – National Gallery of Art in Warsaw, during the exhibition “The Discomfort of Evening” (2022).
