About
The project

Renzo Filinich & InterLab's body of work responds to the urgency of ecological crisis as a crisis of imagination. This work emerges from an ongoing trans-atlantic collaboration between colleagues in Brazil and South Africa, opening new global south epistemologies. The work's algorithmic imaging and sonification of the anthropological collection of the Origins Centre moves away from a focus on representation to embody a collision of knowledge systems. The work speaks to Sylvia Wynter's idea of the human as a multiple and complex form of relational being, inseparable from language, narrative and context. The Anthropocene names a crisis not only of planetary future, but a crisis of knowing, or not knowing, decentring the human to ask questions about the non-human and the-more than-human.

This generative work opens up possibilities for a performative and affective encounter between the archive and a machinic imagination, which moves beyond the logics of property, labour and possession. The algorithm works with facial recognition software, but builds in possibilities for recursion and even mis-recognition, undoing the logics of surveillance, and the racial and gendered codes that haunt computational models. This is a kind of quantum wave from the machinic imagination, producing a palimpsest and cyclical collision of particles, which generate a sonic and visual rhythm through feedback. Here reflexivity does not mean seeing yourself, but the multiplication and amplification as the self as a site of mediation. The work invites interactive viewing from the audience, making space for multiple modulations that never produce the same image twice.