VARIATIONS

(2024-2025)

Commissioned through the Ampersand/Photoworks fellowship, 2024-2025.

V1: Content Aware, Jubilee Place, Brighton

Staged in four venues across the UK, Variations is an an evolving installation exploring the relationship between geological mining and data mining, image-making and machine learning.

V1: Content Aware was exhibited as a public realm installation in Jubilee Square, Brighton as part of Photoworks Weekender in October 2024. Further iterations will travel to The Photographers Gallery London, QUAD in Derby as part of FORMAT International Photography Festival and Stills in Edinburgh across 2025.

V1: Content Aware reflects on shipping containers which carry the raw materials that fuel our digital economy. As they await their journeys, they are assigned numbers, formed into code, traversing the same bodies of water that house the cables carrying data within our global communication systems. En masse, shipping containers appear like pixels, towering on cargo ships the size of buildings, providing us with a picture of the planetary scale of extraction. In V1: Content Aware, the pixelated image collides mining landscapes with digitality, where the digitally produced image is adhered directly onto the surface of the container. The container does not just display images, but also captures them, extracting image data from a public site, and gathering material for the variations that follow.