Mercurybodies: Remote Sensations

The first projection, "Remote Sensation: Mercurybodies", of the two-part video work by knowbotiq deals with satellite images and artificial intelligences that are often used to discover mineral resources. The work focuses on the area around the Rio Atrato in Colombia. It is heavily contaminated with mercury due to illegal gold mining. In this fictional video, different remote technologies communicate with the mercury bodies via a human voice. The second projection, Composting Slow Violence, negotiates sand as a by-product of gold mining. In a listening session knowbotiq and a group of Colombian artists and anthropologists address the dark ecologies ogf mining sand. An AI programme fed by the texts used in the listening session processes the documentary images into new ones . Melted laboratory glass objects and - measuring devices diffract the light In both projections.

knowbotiq reflect in this new work on remote sensing technologies, such as high-resolution satellite images and contamination detectors, which allow "discrete" and in distance interventions without physically going to the site in question. But what can such images, which usually form the basis for economic and political decisions, actually show us?