Welcome to The Diviners Are Not The Authors Of The Utterings
a 1-day solo show on Saturday, April 6, 15:00 tot 21:00u in
SecondRoom
Marialei 33
2018 Antwerp
Belgium
kaart / map
secondroom.org
Featuring: The Belgian premiere of Nereda 2: a Hydromancy (2024), and other pieces in my body of work that identify possible messages beyond the usual range of human language. Header image: a still from The Long Distance Call chapter from NGMI (12’00”, vertical HD, 2022).
Image: the spruce bark beetle gallery pattern traced for the audio file of The Compositor / Composing, 2020
Nereda 2: a Hydromancy (HD, colour/audio, 06’30”) was produced as part of the international Hydromedia residency project. Hydromedia invites artists to develop experimental artistic methods based on co-authorship with nature in order to disseminate complex ecological entanglements and to stimulate art-science interactions. The project is a collaboration between KASK Antwerp, HKU Utrecht, and HfG Karlsruhe, and is co-funded by the Creative Europe program of the European Union.
While on a research field trip to a wastewater treatment plant near the Dutch city of Utrecht, I was struck by the silence on the terrain. Hidden in the installations’ pipes and tubes, water was strangely absent. It was only at the top of one of the large reservoirs towering above ground, that the water surfaced. After heavy rains, the basins discharge excess water in large, metal tubes amplifying the oceanic force with which the water is released. It is here, that the water seems to find a voice, mediated by the plant’s machines.
The audio recordings made of this process formed the base for a form of ‘digital distillation’, isolating the perceived speech by using a variety of applications – including the misuse of A.I. filters – in an attempt to locate the lost water spirits of the region’s folklore. Hydromancy is a divination method: The Diviners Are Not The Authors Of The Utterings. In Nereda 2: a Hydromancy, technological divination is used as a visceral method to escape anthropocentrism. Read more here.
Nereda 2: a Hydromancy will be part of the Hydromedia: Seeing With Water exhibition in Technische Sammlungen (Museum for Technology) in Dresden (D), opening in November 2024.
Installation view of Nereda 2: a Hydromancy in AG | HKU gallery Utrecht, February/March 2024
