Appendix unpacks references, influences and themes from the week’s online programme and announcements. A Saturday digest of sound, video and written content from across the internet; Appendix is a digital reading, watching and listening list for the extra-curious.
i.) Read: Speaking Martian by Daniel Rosenberg via CABINET
An insight into the 19th century French medium, Hélène Smith, whose séances brought about trances that transported her to the planet Mars, remarkably enabling her to speak and write the Martian language.
Jenna Sutela’s audio-visual work nimiia cétiï, this week’s PAUSE feature, documents the interactions between audio recordings of Hélène Smith’s early Martian language, a neural network, and footage of the movements of space bacteria, using machine learning to generate a new form of communication. In Sutela’s work, the computer is a shaman of the modern days, a medium, articulating messages from entities that cannot otherwise speak.