ROOM 15

The Preserving Machine is a research group
focusing on emergent computational,
three-dimensional imagery through practice-
based and theoretical research. This group
perceives the 3d image as something that sits
uneasily in relation to the ontological framework
of previous understandings of photography. Our
research explores the aesthetic and
epistemological issues related to post-
photographic imagery, with transdisciplinary
research inquiries. As a group from a diverse
range of approaches: curating, research, art
practice, we offer multiple perspectives to
navigate and critically examine these spatially
complex, illusory and uncontainable forms.

Agnes Momirski
Anna Nazo
Ariel Caine
Lucas Gabellini-Fava
Peter Ainsworth
Richard Kolker
Sam Plagerson
Sophie Rogers
Theo Ellison
Tom Milnes
Yarli Allison

The work for Format 21 is a multi-media research
collaboration initiated through discussion in
response to Philip K. Dick’s 1953 short story of
the same name. In Dick’s text, set in a society of
the near future ravished by ecological disaster
and war, a scientist called Doc Labyrinth
becomes worried about the decline of humanity.
Comparing his societies contemporary
circumstance with the ruins of previous
civilizations he seeks for a way of safe guarding
(what he sees to be) the most important cultural
artefacts of human achievement; music.
His solution is to create a ‘preserving’ machine
which transmogrifies sheet music into organic
living matter.

For this exhibition, the artists explore the vagaries
of emergent image making apparatus, particularly
the precarious relation between the inputting of
data through a machine as a functionally
transformative act. They consider the physical,
aesthetic, ethical and philosophical problems
embedded in these new technologies. Systems
of control where distortion, translation and
possible mutation are replete but in which
prejudice, surveillance, understandings of worth
and power are tacitly present.