Siliconic Superhighway (2023)
Siliconic Superhighway is a speculative visual and sonic fiction about silicon-based lifeforms and their evolution, journeyed through five ecological stages: submarine, earth, living sand, dust, and not-earth. The work explores silicon not only as a physical material, but as a catalyst to pose ethical and existential questions, such as the role played by our (post)human bodies in a machine-dominated world.
Siliconic Superhighway ventures into the speculative fiction of silicon-based lifeforms, journeyed through five ecological stages: submarine, earth, living sand, dust, and not-earth.
We are wrapped in a digital shell of cloud computing, complex online interactions and interconnected networks, all of which are facilitated by silicon. Our digital existence is anchored by silicon, which shapes the very fabric of our lives from the micro to the macro scale of global infrastructure. This work reimagines diatoms through their organosilicon configurations and animates these microscopic entities as vibrant, living forms. It draws an analogy between the human condition and diatoms that extend our physical form beyond the carbon-based life, suggesting an impending evolution towards silicon-based existence. Our bodies, rendered as data, and our minds, as granular entities, embody the transition towards a new form of life, mediated by the very element that underpins our technological advancements.
The visual animation utilises and combined AI, photogrammetry and point cloud of real-life sites and objects, blending the perspectives on what is natural and artificial. Machine learning, as well as 2D and 3D AI lenticulations, is utilised on a dataset of diatoms to illustrate the concept of organosilicon configurations and animate them as living entities.
Film Stills.
Text to accompany the video work: Moore's Law: Is the exponential growth of semiconductors a law of nature? A Satire on Scientific Explanation via Lewis’s Best System Account
Possible Format:
→ Screening
→ Audiovisual Performance
→ Text
→ Musical Single: Silicon-based Lifeform
Supported by Arts Council of Northern Ireland, Abridged Zone and Live Art Ireland.
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Image by My Linnea Thomasson
Work title: Siliconic Superhighway
Year of Production: 2023
Size of Work: 17 minutes and 33 seconds
Genre: Video Essay, Experimental, Conceptual
Language/Subtitle: English
Text by Jean Baudrillard, Walter Benjamin, C.S. Lewis, Trevor Paglen, Nam June Paik, Hito Steyerl, and Richard Webb
Acknowledgement
Visual: Diarmuid Farrell
Sound: Quantum Foam
With Support of: Arts Council of Northern Ireland, Abridged Zone, Live Art Ireland