Content Aware Depositions [2023]
Content Aware Depositions is a six-component installation within the workers’ dwellings at the Untersberg Quarry near Salzburg, probing the limitations of stone through examinations of monumentality and scalability; ergo breaching an exploration of the precarious limits of extraction and man’s [long-term] relation to the mechanical basis of such undergoings. Content Aware Depositions is an analysis of double standards reciprocating man-via-nature within machine-via-man, of the changing conditions in our relationship with geology — the strata of the virtual and the real, the endurance of the industrial within nature. The installation is furthermore an interrogation of present dynamics within the limestone quarry [often mistaken for marble] consequentially reflecting social depositions on content aware scales, from local to dislocal. The Untersberg Quarry, currently operated by Marmor Kiefer AG, established in 1887 had already been in functional use by the Romans, as well as by Germany’s National Socialist Party; articulated around an infamous card table. Operated at present by five men of northern balkan origin between the ages of 50 to 60 [one of which abides in the Untersberg Quarry with his entire family], an ineffective atmosphere and lack of extreme machinery, as well as the noticeable autonomy of each worker, motivates a spectral climate. Constant precipitation and ill winds intensify this nuance. Talismans and metal constructions hang in the homes and machines of the workers. Only 15% of all cut stone is used.
01/06 [Compressed] Video Loop, 4:44 Min.
Depositions of stones formed via processes spanning over a millenia are “resized” through the transformation of image based on the location of the lowest resistance of pixel color sequences. Using content aware image resizing, a tool created 15 years ago for “the authentic adjustment” of digital images displayed on diverse mobile terminals, the dissolving stone — one of the foundations on which life on Earth evolved — is algorithmically seam carved through the addition of negative weights to the energy of an image.1
02/06 Dual-Channel Sound Installation
Produced [as an experimental first] within the workers’ dwellings. Vibrations of a diamond wire saw cutting the Untersberg rock are recorded by a geophone on site [27.07.2023] and played in the worker’s quarters next to the room where the radio runs. An aftereffect simulation from precarious exposure to the extremely low frequencies of mechanical infrasound shakes the aura around each worker, interrogating the evolution of that which listens to the machine.
03/06 Ground Limestone, Water. 28x8x8cm
Pressed entirely out of ground limestone dust, produced by the diamond wire saw while cutting. The wedge contradicts fragility in the same moment it reverses material, porous in persiflage.
04/06 Inkjet Prints on Paper, Limestone. Dimensions Variable
Iron wedges are used to balance giant segments of limestone after an initial cut in the bottom of the quarrying site. As such, epitomizing a genesis of form, monumentally embedding decades of contact with the hands of workers and the stone. Scratches and abrasions engraved by the daily processes of the quarry are highlighted by the scanning of such iron wedges. The printed material is thereafter attached to cut blocks with small limestone wedges.
05/06 Metre Stick. 22x22x5cm
06/06 [Drilled] Unprocessed Limestone. Dimensions Variable
A litmus test anticipating the limitations of stone. Contracting the typical modernist condition of creation aimed toward the beautiful or useful, the unprocessed limestone grasps senselessness and loss, it is fitted and probed to a negative exponent. It liquidates the power enforced upon it. Similar to metals [raw or cast], the limestone is not as stable as expectations advertise.
1https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qadw0BRKeMk
2John Cage, A Year from Monday [p.7] Wesleyan University Press. Middletown, Connecticut, 1963.