Unravelling Unseen & Unheard Narratives
Uncover hidden stories through reconstruction, speculation and vocalisation. Reveal patients’ and survivors’ healthcare struggles. Listen to plants communicate through frequencies beyond human hearing. Prioritize microbial experience over human-centric perspectives. Use AI and fictioning to fill gaps in historical knowledge. Go behind the walls of private corporations and gain insights.
In this exhibit, we explore how experimental digital media methods can reveal hidden narratives governed by repositories of official knowledge. Taking the archive, the university, the hospital, the corporation and the scientific institution as sites of exploration, each exhibit interrogates the dynamics of knowledge ownership and visibility in five unique experiential artworks. The goal is to enable a critical dialogue between society, technology and science.
Mammary Mountain sheds light on the harrowing struggles of treatment for breast cancer patients, amplifying unheard voices within healthcare systems. The Materialised Temporality of Dust invites viewers to experience institutional space and time from a microbial perspective, through the notion of the pluriverse. Arquivista AI leverages artificial intelligence to visualize alternative historical narratives for incomplete archives. Seeing Through the Walls of Silicon Valley inverts the surveillant gaze of social media companies through a VR replica of the tech campus, prompting reflection on power dynamics in corporate spaces. Sioscadh challenges traditional authority by exploring alternative botanical knowledge systems through human-machine-plant performance.
Collectively, these experiential artworks aim to liberate captive testimonies and histories, fostering critical dialogue and empowering unheard voices. They envision a possibility where hidden narratives are exposed and positive change prevails.
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Arquivista AI
Nestor Pestana (PT/VE)
Arquivista AI is a research platform that creatively explores the relationships between gaps in historical knowledge and artificial intelligence. Through archival research, historical gaps are identified and filled in with alternative histories, deliriums and glitches generated with AI.
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Mammary Mountain
Tara Baoth Mooney (IE), Camille Baker (CA/GB), Maf’j Alvarez (GB/ES)
Mammary Mountain is an immersive virtual reality (VR) experience that explores disease within the body during breast cancer and the body’s relationship to the broader context of the land. This immersive experience tells the lesser-told stories of patients and survivors — not only of survival, but of trauma from the life-changing experience of (breast) cancer…
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Seeing Through the Walls of Silicon Valley
Claude Dutson (GB)
Seeing Through the Walls of Silicon Valley is a VR installation inviting the public into the private domain of the tech campus. Google, Apple and Meta’s campuses testify to their status and influence on public life, yet remain inaccessible to the general public.
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Sioscadh
Matt Lewis (GB)
Sioscadh is a sonic knowledge system built on onomatopoeia, non-verbal sounds, eco-acoustic recordings and the Freesoound database. It is an ongoing collaboration between plants, humans and machines. All sounds heard during the performances are drawn from an improvisation between a collection of plants, machines, human voices and the Freesound API.
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The Materialised Temporality of Dust
Dr Carolina Ramirez-Figueroa (MX), Antony Nevin (NZ), Campbell Orme (UK), Laura Selby (UK) and Neil Aldridge (NZ)
The Materialised Temporality of Dust is an immersive VR experience that uses dust as a material device to explore temporality and investigate the past and future from a microbial perspective. It invites audiences to engage with the notion of the pluriverse, a world of many worlds.
Royal College of Art (GB)
The Royal College of Art (RCA) is the world’s leading postgraduate art and design university. Within the RCA, the School of Communication interrogates how communication develops new ways of experiencing and interacting with the world. We conceptualize, craft and are storytellers with animation, data visualization, game design, graphic design, illustration, materials, photography, moving image, installation, XR experiences and site-specific work and soundscapes.
Credits
We would like to acknowledge the Dean of the School of Communication, Kerry Curtis, for her unwavering support, and the Heads of Programme for Digital Direction, Tom Simmons and Information Experience Design, Danielle Barrios-O’Neill and the administrative support of Dieudonnee Burrows and her team. The works and collaborations presented here are from the tutors of the Digital Direction and Information Experience Design Programmes.
For Mammary Mountain, we extend our gratitude to collaborators Tara Baoth Mooney and Maf’j Alvarez.
For The Materialised Temporality of Dust we are deeply grateful to Antony Nevin for his continuous, thought-provoking conversations, financial and technical support. We are also grateful to Neil Aldridge for his insightful guidance, creative input and support in developing the soundscape. We would like to thank Luke Holland for technical consulting.
Funding support has been graciously been made by the RCA School of Communication and the RCA Research and Knowledge Exchange department. Funding for the Mammary Mountain was granted by The Arts Council England National Lottery Fund, the Arts Council Ireland Creative Ireland, Leitrum Country Council (Ireland), Creative Heartlands (Ireland) and Root Interactive.