AUTONOMOUS BODY
2024
Commissioned by Foundazione Mast, Bologna
Crushed car panel, steel frame, Tesla vehicle paint, C-type print, aluminium. Found alloy wheels, PLA, hydroprint, plinth.
The contemporary car plays a key role in shaping our technological landscape. As autonomous vehicle technologies have developed, the car extracts data and produces images of the environment in the form of Lidar scans and 3d maps, relying on the images that it builds of the landscape to function. In the words of Harun Farocki, the images are operational; they are made both by and for the machine.
At the centre of the work is a photographic collage that borrows the compositional framework of the open road motif, ubiquitous in car advertising. This landscape is collapsed with images of mining sites associated both with the rare earth minerals needed to support the digital economy and sites of oil and coal extraction which has been essential for the proliferation of petrol vehicles. The image plane is disrupted by strategically placed images of webs of smashed glass, framed by the physical crushed carcass of the car. Autonomous Body aims to make new connections between the history and future of car manufacturing and the extractive processes that enable it, reflecting on the shift towards the car as another machine to which we have begun to relinquish control. It locates the car accident within the manufacturing process, concealing it within the glossy exterior of the painted surface.
