Oracle occurs in a derelict textile factory in Laurium, a seaside town in Attica that used to be a significant silver mine territory since antiquity, the main source of ancient Athenian wealth and naval power. Those mines were reworked from the late 19th century to the 1980’s for ore extraction, an activity that left its grave environmental impact on the area’s soil to this day. Once part of the local industrial economy that collapsed before the turn of the millennium, this specific industrial ruin was recently leaked to be the future site of a datacenter complex to be built by one of the so-called “Big Five” multinational information technology corporations for the purpose of running dedicated Cloud, IoT and AI services.

Sculptural appearances inhabit the entropic spaces of this industrial ghost site, hybrids between human-resembling and non-human facial forms, seeding from chimeric compositions between archaeological photogrammetric scans and online-found threedimensional models referencing contemporary technocultures. Their metallic materiality reflects the local geological heritage and the mineral composition of the electronic hardware that enables the uncanny machinic intelligence and the haunting abstraction of computational operations. The digital interface of Oracle is permeated by formations of visual coding and written language generated by simulated processes of pattern recognition, predictive mutations, and synthetic apophenia. The physical and psychic underground space is still the origin of such forms of contemporary oracular production, where the ancient practices of hallucination deriving from subterranean chemical fumes gave their place to the extractivism of minerals and psychosocial data that feeds the deep-dreaming of the algorithmic Cloud.

As a place of memory and a place to become, an assemblage of mythological, historical, and technological entities, a generative process, or a resulting outcome left for interpretation, Oracle becomes a mediative entanglement of collapsing timelines, of imaginaries and anxieties bound to technological, socioeconomic and environmental transformation.

 

Visit Oracle at KW’s The Last Museum