2015
A collaboration with Wesley Goatley, Familiars was an Arts and Technology Commission for the Brighton Digital Festival 2016, and was first installed at Lighthouse Arts, Brighton.
Familiars is an immersive installation that materialises the presence, function, and fragility of the unseen logistical infrastructure that underpins the modern world, yet is often coded as separate to society.
Exploiting Brighton’s presence and location in this infrastructure, the piece creates a mapped representation by directly intercepting logistical signals broadcast via radio by local air, sea, and train freight vessels and transmuting the data into ambisonics and floor-projected visualisations. Through this, it reveals the technical and legal challenges that present themselves when we choose to observe this ever-present yet largely inaccessible system.
As part of the exhibition, Wesley and I hosted an evening of talks - Unfamiliar Matter - in which myself, Alice Bell, and Ingrid Burrington, discussed the infrastructures of logistics, energy, and internet systems. Wesley and I delivered a guest lecture at the Open Data Institute on Familiars, data and infrastructures, which can be seen here.
[Embed video here: https://vimeo.com/140209104]