Entangled Others
Entangled Others is an experimental artist duo composed of Feileacan Kirkbride McCormick and Sofia Crespo. Their collaborative practice delves into the intricate web of relationships between the more-than-human world and its interaction with human technologies. Driven by the concept of entanglement—a complex state where no single entity exists in isolation, and every action, interaction, and expression resonates through a multitude of interconnected beings.
In their practice, McCormick and Crespo explore the uncanny and eerie spaces that lie between human technologies and non-human worlds, advocating for the dissolution of the self-imposed distance that separates us from the richness of our interwoven existence. Their art emphasises the necessity of recognising and nurturing the diversity and interconnectedness that define our shared environment.
Sediment nodes
Sediment-laden waters often appear muddily opaque, the multitude of suspended particles disturbed by wind, tide, storm, flood, or even our activities seemingly cloud our view of aquatic life, obscuring them. We spare little thought of the suspended sediment itself, for it signals that there is or was movement, yet it too is full of life, colour and form.
The suspended cloud of inorganic matter is, in fact, a multitude: inorganic particles of silt, clay and sand are the host and neighbour to the algal, the bacterial, mingling with particles of organic matter, microorganisms and larger, yet still small, lifeforms that find their sustenance and shelter in the obscure. Furthermore, the minerals and denizens diffuse and reflect and ultimately diffuse the light, creating complex conditions within the microscopic.
Sediment Nodes explores the connections and interconnections of what we assume inert, yet disturbed, of the complexities of colour and light hidden from us by the scale and the diffusion of light and osmosis within a liquid medium.
Self contained
All that we consider living around us is partly the result of expressing the organic encoding of information in DNA form. The series ‘self-contained’ takes inspiration from the phenomena of encoding & decoding, a process rife with mutations. Coupled with the evolutionary nature of the crossbreeding and random changes, this mirrors some of the memetic aspects of our digital spaces wherein images are often combined, edited, degraded or re-contextualised.
In this series, target images becomes the subject of an iterative crossbreeding of random samples of strings from other compressed images, leading to a mutative evolution. Akin to grafting two plants together here images from a dataset are randomly spliced into the image “genome”. Furthermore rudimentary a-life simulations are utilised to explore notions of "error correction" in the mutative process, tentatively tracing the contours of the complexities of natural processes. Decoding regenerates the image to a more recognisable form which is then aided by neural networks trained on the same dataset to further return colour and detail.
It is this iterative, simultaneous process of compression-decompression that the works depict. Which, as around us, occurs in shared simultaneity. Just as our cells divide, mutate and grow, so do the contents of our shared digital spaces as we remix, are remixed, hyped, and made obsolete.
9:16
9:16 is a vertical, digital gallery displaying 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, right here in our space in Bombarda. Throughout 2024, we will be showcasing the work of various artists from various disciplines of video and digital art and finally bringing media arts to one of the most creatively dynamic neighbourhoods in Porto.
