“Within the rectangle, we encounter and are made to encounter ourselves. Whilst it is catastrophic and transformative interventions into geologic time that enable this, our temporal experience of life as mediated by the digital dislocates us from its enactment. Earthly history and the time this entails are made into minute processors and microchips, millions of years are shrunk into microscopic parts. These parts assist us in our own entrapment, as we self-surveil and are rendered as algorithmic predictors, no longer human but a tool for machine learning. The rectangle alters temporal experience; as the visitor tracks their visit on the O device, there is a loss of temporal awareness. No longer is there an attention to the passage of time in the world, but rather, attention is drawn to the record and measurement of it within the device. This speaks not only to the O, but all devices, as ‘real time’ becomes a Borgesian record of experience occurring simultaneously with existence. In this manner, the rectangle becomes what Camille Henrot identifies as “the mark of the division between man and nature,” containing and thus obscuring tangled geo-human temporalities within.
In Mine, the machinations and structures of the rapidly accelerating digital present are illuminated for what they are, as tied to the manipulation of deep time and fossil fuels in the pursuit of power and control. Leveraging the capabilities of the O, which is made from the same minerals critiqued by the exhibition, and mines the data of Mona’s patrons, Mine presents as a spatio-temporal unity — in which “the human body, technological device, and physical location form an ecology.” This ecology, occurring within the both the frame of the board game and the underground exhibition space, is one whereby the visitor, in their experience of reality augmented by the O, is able to ‘sense’ the world anew. This world is one that is marked by acceleration; in the shrinking of temporal distance between events and the advent of ‘real-time’. This new world is one that is marked too by visibility, in our capacity to witness the unfolding of events as they happen, regardless of distance, as transmitted to us in a continual stream. This visibility is a central facet of Mine, in its relation to the augmented reality experiences of the work. Within Mine, we are able to witness the critically endangered King Island brown thornbill, albeit a digitally rendered simulacra, and are made acutely aware of the costs of our spectatorship. “
