Laura Fong Prosper and Tin Wilke
MEMORIAL MATTER
Memorial Matter is a hybrid installation co-created as joint artistic research by the artists Tin Wilke and Laura Fong Prosper to explore various image carriers such as 3D objects, textiles, and recycled fibres that emerge from the AI experiments with the 16-mm film archive material.
Memorial Matter deals with enigmatic crossovers between earthly materials and digital culture. The artists are working with an extensive historic 16mm film archive that reveals the use of industrial technology to extract natural resources as a sign of progress. 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 is to the minerals from which they were constructed. There is a shift from smooth, shiny and symmetrical forms to spaces of friction, imperfection and roughness – digital ruins as architectures of material memory.
During the residency at E-WERK, Tin Wilke worked on 3D Sculptures created with the ashes that E-WERK generates as a by-product for it's energy production, utilising the facilities and know how of the Gewerbehof in Luckenwalde, an external site of the University of Applied Sciences, Potsdam and Wildau that has a specialised 3D printing machine. Tin created a data set of still images from the 16 mm archive containing the imaginings of progress, based on industrialisation, mining and extractivism. The still images were fed into a StyleGan neural network that created new images containing the condensed visual information of the modernities project of progress. These images were converted into printable 3D objects with the support of Angel Salazar. In doing so, Tin has combined digital technology with regional biomaterials, shifting the digital imaginary to the rematerialisation of a new possible space-time from the ruins of the Anthropocene age. For this project, together with artist Lucía Tieff, they have also been working with Xanthan and ashes-based biomaterial for 3D printing, as well as with a potato starch-based biopolymer mixed with recycled waste of ashes to create recipes for the manufacturing of bioplastic sheets that envelope and intervene the silk screen prints produced by Laura Fong Prosper.
