Residue

Steel, copper, aluminium, plastic, 3D printed filament, latex tubing, CT scan data, inkjet on paper
2022

Installation at Stanley Picker Gallery, Kingston School of Art. Part of the DRHA 2022 conference exhibition.

‘Residue’ operates on the relationship between digital post-production and the production of animals after their death. To post-produce is to enter into a particular relationship with time, to construct a speculative future after the fact. This installation consists of a re-photographed and mounted CT scan of the extinct thylacine (also known at the Tasmanian tiger) made available by researchers at the University of Melbourne. Renewed visibility through medical imaging and archival footage has been a major impetus for attempts to restore thylacine populations via gene editing. This thylacine is, quite literally, post-produced, archived in a simulation of visibility which has disappeared; it hovers in between appearance and disappearance, in-between being extant and extinct.

‘Residue’ considers this year’s DRHA conference theme of sustainability by asking what is at stake in sustaining nonhuman worlds and ecology in a simulated liveliness which no longer exists? Does ecological sustainability necessitate de-extinction, a restoration of a lost pastness or a (perhaps reluctant) embrace of post-ness? To live sustainable futures for both human and nonhuman beings, do we ultimately have an imperative to restore a distinct (and often fictional) backdrop of “nature” or do we “stay with the trouble”, as Donna Haraway would have it, and reimagine our ecological relationships in a post-natural world?

Data available at https://datadryad.org/stash/dataset/doi:10.5061/dryad.5h8k3