Jellied Machines draws upon weird sonic renderings of the body in pulp literature—enter sci-fi, horror, cyber-Gothic and bio-punk—repurposing their queasy tropes as strategies for suggesting (in)human presence via fragments of sensorial debris.
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The technician lowered the tonearm onto the acetate record, which produced a rhythmic sequence of sharp clicks, before decaying into a low, echoing pulse. Lifting it off, he sniffed in irritation and sat down. X “Can’t say I’m surprised; this happens from time to time.” K “huh?” X “…easy enough to miss, you tune out for what…maybe two seconds? A burst of spinal static bleeds through the server’s hypodermic memory barriers and pretty soon your whole trace-line is burnt to a crisp.” K “…. recovery procedure?” X “None…at least none that I know of. His cloud matrix is dead meat at this point. Even if you could reverse the transfer…reconstruct the sequence, there’d be no way of knowing which proteins belong to which data-locks.” K “…but those sounds?” X “…well, that’s the problem; something’s been printed on that disc, but it’s not William…at least, not as we knew him.”
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See the exhibition room sheet here.