Mineral Firmament
Titanik Galleria, Turku, Finland, 2022
Mineral Firmament is inspired by convergences between anthropocene discourse and the recently resurged Flat Earth cosmology in their fights for the geologic imagination. Specifically, their critiques of the dominant model of our relationship to the earth, a shared obsession with the limits of our knowledge and perception, and their proximity to “intuitive” and “scalar” understandings of the world.
Across most of the inhabited earth, a 50 Hz electrical grid possesses the information flows of our communications environment. Here, deep time, technological systems, and planetary processes collapse into discrete media fields. Amidst this buzzing firmament, disparate movements engage in turf wars, yet share the view of the commonly accepted model of the earth being an illusion: one that is either too stable or too mobile.
From this shared perspective, the work observes the encirclement of thought and the frictions that arise when the rigidity of our ideas and interfaces brace with the flux of the world. As it breaks itself down, it stays in dialogue with how the superstitious and the speculative might engage as our media spaces proliferate as self-amplifying bubbles.
Mineral Firmament takes its title from the Flat Earth belief that the world is bound by an ice wall vaulting us from the external firmament. A cement subwoofer forms a flat, stationary topography in which cement-encased microphones hum in a discursive feedback loop, walling their sensory threshold off from the external world. Their buzzing is entangled within electromagnetic recordings of the arctic aurora taken outside of the Finnish power grid. Where some conspiracists believe the weather is controlled, here we are “presented” with the earth-scale energies emanating from the ionospheric firmament “beyond the ice wall”.