Digital Ecologies 3, July 2025

image - from research for Glyptodont / Logical Fund Systems

This was great - this event at Bath Spa Uni on 24-25 July, I discussed some new work on a panel on 'soil as place, internet as placelessness'. Here's some info:

The presentation departs from Weir’s previous work (Pazugoo), burying objects underground as long-term markers of nuclear waste, and writing around burial and ancestrality by philosopher Elizabeth Povinelli. It proposes a fatberg under One Aldgate, London as mass anonymous collective burial process, the inheritance and hidden underside of waste products of capitalism, flushed as preservation. Against an ideology of digital immateriality, it is twisted body horror as memorial practice, a more-than-human archive which may or may never be unearthed. Defined through its flows and blockages, it acts as dark mirror to financial data flows above the surface. 

Weir presents work in the form of ritualistic offerings to the fatberg, paranoid mapping of offshore finance (through the figure of the Armadillo), an encounter with a discarded meteorite scrap, and a music genre (for an un-named bank) vaporising waste through generative AI.   

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I enjoyed the performative nature of the presentation drawing absurd humour from the work. I'm developing this now making a documentation in the form of a self-aware video essay narrated by Mariah (AI assistant).

images - promo collage; still from Polymerized Flow Snag 2 (work in progress); from research for Glyptodont / Logical Fund Systems ; still from Fatberg Under Barclays (Night Version); action shot.