Copper Spun Limbs, Yvette James
07.04 – 29.04 2022
SEVENTH Gallery
This text by Sueann Chen is presented alongside the exhibition Copper Spun Limbs by Yvette James
What echoes, shadows, and excess of our bodies are materialised, and thus collected?
Every minute of the day, our bodies shed 40,000 dead skin cells. Each year, our screen time increases exponentially, as corporations find ways to keep our attention for maximum extraction. Each day, we produce 2.5 quintillion bytes of data. Fragments of our bodies accumulate throughout space. We are enveloped by a membrane, fabricated by a web of data.
Copper Spun Limbs materialises the dark inner workings of data collection, production, and its contingent relationship with the human body. Our bodies have become the central vessel for the production and collection of biometric data. Everyday our bodies are in constant metabolic action processing materials, producing data, and accumulating waste. These excesses flood through our veins, mind, skin, and organs, and are expelled into bins, drains, and data storages. These residues collect and accumulate over time, heavy metals and plastic occupy the lower reaches of our liver, our skin discolours and congests. Oils, blood, and mucus stain the porcelain of our showers and sinks. The excess traces of our digital and physical activity are held and hidden in unknown storages, unknown servers, in unknown places. Our seemingly invisible excess materialises over time, into visible accumulations. The traces of our fingerprints, voice, DNA, walking style, facial features and geometry are found in the programming of self-driving cars, artificial intelligence, feed algorithms and drone strikes.
Dredged from our bodies, the saturation and viscosity of our data forms the web of our digital infrastructure. Our numerical and biometric secretions are just as foul, mucusy and staining as the sludges and oils we scrape off our skin. It
accumulates like fatbergs underground in drains. Threads of telecommunicative copper, fibre optics, metals and plastic are woven through our body, expediting the transmission of our biometry. Data leaks from our veins through to the fingertips, and into the impenetrable obsidian.
Iris recognitions are measured as one of the most accurate biometric modalities. Cameras capture, analyse, and evaluate the colour, size and movements of our iris’ to uniquely classify and compartmentalise our identities. Like our iris patterns, no single oral cavity is the same. Dental identification is often used post-mortem for burn victims and corpses with disfigured facial features that cannot be identified. Even dead and damaged, we are recognisable. With the plethora of data and archives of our movements, behaviours, and biometry, it has become even easier.
Data thought to be deleted is moved out of sight, hidden, buried, and surviving. Eventually, the accumulation of data overflows and soaks through the surface, and the only way to contain it is to build bigger and stronger servers.
…
You look down into the sink, and you can just make yourself out, distorted in the slick reflection of the oil. You wonder how much more it needs from you before it becomes a perfect reflection.
Sueann Chen (陈彦聿) is a writer and cat lover
living in Naarm, Melbourne.
07.04 – 29.04 2022
SEVENTH Gallery
This text by Sueann Chen is presented alongside the exhibition Copper Spun Limbs by Yvette James
What echoes, shadows, and excess of our bodies are materialised, and thus collected?
Every minute of the day, our bodies shed 40,000 dead skin cells. Each year, our screen time increases exponentially, as corporations find ways to keep our attention for maximum extraction. Each day, we produce 2.5 quintillion bytes of data. Fragments of our bodies accumulate throughout space. We are enveloped by a membrane, fabricated by a web of data.
Copper Spun Limbs materialises the dark inner workings of data collection, production, and its contingent relationship with the human body. Our bodies have become the central vessel for the production and collection of biometric data. Everyday our bodies are in constant metabolic action processing materials, producing data, and accumulating waste. These excesses flood through our veins, mind, skin, and organs, and are expelled into bins, drains, and data storages. These residues collect and accumulate over time, heavy metals and plastic occupy the lower reaches of our liver, our skin discolours and congests. Oils, blood, and mucus stain the porcelain of our showers and sinks. The excess traces of our digital and physical activity are held and hidden in unknown storages, unknown servers, in unknown places. Our seemingly invisible excess materialises over time, into visible accumulations. The traces of our fingerprints, voice, DNA, walking style, facial features and geometry are found in the programming of self-driving cars, artificial intelligence, feed algorithms and drone strikes.
Dredged from our bodies, the saturation and viscosity of our data forms the web of our digital infrastructure. Our numerical and biometric secretions are just as foul, mucusy and staining as the sludges and oils we scrape off our skin. It
accumulates like fatbergs underground in drains. Threads of telecommunicative copper, fibre optics, metals and plastic are woven through our body, expediting the transmission of our biometry. Data leaks from our veins through to the fingertips, and into the impenetrable obsidian.
Iris recognitions are measured as one of the most accurate biometric modalities. Cameras capture, analyse, and evaluate the colour, size and movements of our iris’ to uniquely classify and compartmentalise our identities. Like our iris patterns, no single oral cavity is the same. Dental identification is often used post-mortem for burn victims and corpses with disfigured facial features that cannot be identified. Even dead and damaged, we are recognisable. With the plethora of data and archives of our movements, behaviours, and biometry, it has become even easier.
Data thought to be deleted is moved out of sight, hidden, buried, and surviving. Eventually, the accumulation of data overflows and soaks through the surface, and the only way to contain it is to build bigger and stronger servers.
…
You look down into the sink, and you can just make yourself out, distorted in the slick reflection of the oil. You wonder how much more it needs from you before it becomes a perfect reflection.
Sueann Chen (陈彦聿) is a writer and cat lover
living in Naarm, Melbourne.