Mullaloo and Magnus is an exhibition about an interconnected system composed of an aquifer — Mullaloo — and a supercomputer Magnus.
For millions of years, the Mullaloo aquifer was sealed, plantless and occupied only by stygofauna and troglofauna that live only off the remains of each other (we don’t really know how they can survive like this). The animals and bacteria that make up the ecosystem of the aquifer have hardly been seen. We are only just beginning to be able to sense them through Environmental DNA (eDNA) sampling technology, a technique which has only recently been made available by supercomputing. Magnus, the fastest supercomputer in the southern hemisphere, sits above the Mullaloo aquifer. As Dr Mathew Campbell and Dr Mattia Saccò process the eDNA in the water of the Mullaloo using Magnus, the waters of the aquifer flow through Magnus itself, cooling its processors, to be expelled back into the aquifer. A system at once symbiotic and compromised.
Mullaloo and Magnus presents a sculpture, generative sound work and a realtime eDNA simulation made through collaboration with Dr Mattia Saccò and Dr Matthew Campbell.
With support from the Subterranean and Groundwater Ecology (SuRGE) Group at Curtin University, Pawsey Supercomputing Center Visualisation Lab and CSIRO.
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See the exhibition text here.