Shift Register

IXDM artist-researchers Martin Howse and Jamie Allen will present current aspects of their research project Shift Register. Shift Register is an investigation into how human technological and infrastructural activities have marked the earth.

The earth has been transformed into a ‘planetary laboratory’ subject to further study, control and comprehension. Knowledge of these interactions render to experience global scale phenomena like climate change, dissolving modernist illusions such as the separation of ‘nature’ and ‘society’. As such, it is critical that we engage in new means of composing more public understandings of this global experience. This project attempts to register the shifts between industrialised capitalism and the knowledge afforded by techno-science, between the global scale effects of such activities and the experience of individuals and communities, and between earth as a natural object and as an agent of culture. The project addresses the interdisciplinary problem of how to identify, catalogue and make publically legible these shifts through methods related to natural science fieldwork, artistic research, and critically oriented translational practices of media and technology.

The colloquium session will allow to reflect on the project’s research processes which already comprises quite a range of international workshops, artistic commissions and interventions as well as publication strategies.