Jenna Sutela joins collaborators Memo Akten, Somerset House Studios resident and Damien Henry, Head of Innovation at the Google Arts & Culture Lab, for an exclusive screening and talk on her latest audio-visual work, nimiia cétiï, moderated by curator of the nomadic platform A---Z Anne Duffau.
Inspired by experiments in interspecies communication and aspiring to connect with a world beyond our consciousness, nimiia cétiï documents the interactions between a neural network, audio recordings of early Martian language, and footage of the movements of extremophilic bacteria. Here, the computer is a shaman, channelling messages from entities that usually cannot speak. However, it is also an alien of our creation.
Following the talk, the video installation will be available to view in the New Wing entrance from 05-15 September 2018.
Jenna Sutela works with words, sounds, and other living materials. Her installations and performances seek to identify and react to precarious social and material moments, often in relation to technology. Sutela’s artwork has been presented at Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin, Serpentine Marathon in London, Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art in Helsinki, and The Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo. Last year, she edited Orgs: From Slime Mold to Silicon Valley and Beyond (Garret Publications 2017), an experimental survey of decentralized organisms and organizations, expanding on her collaboration with Physarum polycephalum, the single-celled yet “many-headed” slime mold.
Memo Akten is an artist working with computation as a medium, exploring the collisions between nature, science, technology, ethics, ritual, tradition and religion. Combining critical and conceptual approaches with investigations into form, movement and sound, he creates data dramatizations of natural and anthropogenic processes. Alongside his practice, he is currently working towards a PhD at Goldsmiths University of London in artificial intelligence and expressive human-machine interaction. His work has been shown and performed internationally, featured in books and academic papers; and in 2013 Akten received the Prix Ars Electronica Golden Nica for his collaboration with Quayola, ‘Forms’.
Damien Henry is Experiments team lead for the Google Arts & Culture Lab, where he directs a team of creative coders and organises artist residencies. He is the co-inventor of Google Cardboard, an award winning virtual reality headset in cardboard. Prior to Google, Damien was CTO of a voice analysis company and co-founded AudioGaming, a sound synthesis startup. He is also the creator of Novelab, a small studio focused on cutting-edge technologies. Damien has an engineering degree in mechanics and acoustics ; he has been coding since the age of 10 and has never stopped exploring since then. He is passionate about applying virtual reality and machine learning to arts and is an occasional exhibit curator in this field.
Anne Duffau has collaborated in various projects with ArtLicks, CGP Gallery, the Institute for Mathematical Sciences Project, V22, Danielle Arnaud, Please Stand By, or-bits.com, jury member at PAF Olomouc (2017) & Tenderflix. She works at the Royal College of Art as the Curriculum and Special Projects Coordinator for the School of Fine Art, runs the StudioRCA Riverlight in Nine Elms & teaches in the Moving Image Programme. Currently developing newly commissioned installations around the idea of displacement and otherness at the StudioRCA. The series presents studies of deconstruction of pre-conceived/imperialist knowledge, often through the scope of science fiction, with a selection of solo exhibitions. A---Z has presented series of screenings, performances as well as exhibitions around themes such as transgender, post-human and morphing bodies.
Jenna would also like to thank Kieran Bates from the Institute of Zoology at Imperial College London, Adam Laschinger for sound recordings, and Manus Nijhoff and Leith Benkhedda for animation. The work includes Miako Klein in contrabass recorder and Shin-Joo Morgantini in flute, with sound production by Ville Haimala.
