Memorial Matter

Tin Wilke & Laura Fong Prosper

Our digital culture has a strong material condition, it is based on millennia-old temporal strata that contain the writing of the terrestrial life which is also the geological foundation where the archive of our collective memory has been written, from ancient to contemporary data technologies.
Memorial Matter deals with the enigmatic crossovers between earth materials and intertwined temporalities. An extensive historic film archive that reveals the use of industrial technology to extract natural resources as a sign of progress is used by the artists. They disrupt material temporalities using artificial neural networks to transform the progressive imaginaries of the 20th century into materials that refer to a future as distant as the past of the minerals from which they were constructed. A shift from smooth, shiny and symmetrical forms to spaces of friction, imperfection and roughness: digital ruins as architectures of material memory.
From a hybrid practice that crosses analog archive and digital media, Tin Wilke searches for morphological patterns in archival machines to propose the creation of fictional narratives about futures of coexistence between humans and non-humans, shifting the digital imaginary to the rematerialization of a new possible space-time from the ruins of the Anthropocene. 
The process that has led Laura Fong Prosper to move from digital technologies to textile materials generates dialogues between apparently opposing media that, however, retain a common root in deep planetary time. Starting from this idea, the artist proposes to turn our  gaze towards technologies that bring us closer to other relationships with nature.
The artists' intention lies in the interaction between filmic archival material, digital technologies and organic processes to weave possible paths towards more sustainable futures, as well as to propose digital speculations and the possibilities of making them tangible through the use of recycled and biodegradable materials.