Geo Cymatic Infiltrator (Phat Man & Tallboy)

Geo Cymatic Infiltrator (2017) was commissioned by the Centre for Contemporary Art, Derry-Londonderry, for the Tiny deaths exhibition (curated by Alissa Kliest and Matt Packer). This artwork implements a contagious ontology by means of the Stuxnet computer virus - reputedly developed by the CIA to disrupt the Iranian nuclear refinement program - and its infection of geoacoustic data of the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi earthquake. The artwork manifests a sonic materialisation at an infrasonic level, the paired sculptures resonating at frequencies of 16Hz and 19Hz, exhibiting a technical paradigm where custom designed tapped trumpet speakers resonate with a geologic affectivity.

The artwork proposes the territorialisation of the real by the digital, whereby the virus parasitically attaches itself to the earthquake, or more precisely, the virtual infects the geologic. The virus becomes an agent, not of a virtual machination in the mining of big data, but a linguistic proponent in the action of planetary movement and sedimentation. Code resonates materially, gaining an affective significance. Propagation occurs by means of the viral, the sonic, the linguistic and the geologic. The impetus of this artistic research is to speculate what I have termed a geo-linguistic condition; strategies which engage or instrumentalise nonlinear aesthetics at a geologic resolution. Through such praxis the Anthropocene can be rendered more authentically, made present. But also, through the deliberation of a nonhuman capacity for language, it is possible to reify a semiotics of the geologic, and a means of writing nonlinearly and speaking to the future-to-come.