LAMENT (The Mine Has Been Opened Up Well)

LAMENT is a mixed reality performance that excavates sites, histories, and languages of mining in a poetics of generative telegraphy, geophysical extraction, and the multilingual hauntings of forgotten laborers. Immersed in a lush 3d point-cloud derived from Lidar scans of a defunct copper mine, two performers, I (input) and O (output), operate a custom augmented reality system to extract, hoist, encrypt and decrypt language from original and archival sources while composing through a database of 30,000 telegraph codes used for electrical communications of the mining industry in the 19th and early 20th century. LAMENT is a sited compression of the work, SMOKEPENNY LYRICHORD HEAVENBRED, adapted for the Translations festival and the Mosteiro de São Bento da Vitória. Translation manifests in the work through the reanimation of a mine captured by remote sensing, the use of AR to scan and transform its surroundings, and the multivalent SHUDDERING of telegraphic codes that radiate towards their linguistic surface connotations and their arbitrary meanings in codebooks and encryption techniques. From the data-void, a gap in the (point) cloud at the Thursday, July 20 • 551 center of the system, comes a raining lament that sounds the material substrate of modern network culture, spotlighting labor practices and struggles composing the transnational circuitry of copper - sought-after conductor at the heart of electricity and communications technologies - to render the data that we breathe via encrypted message mined and struck from the historical record by way of pneumatic drill - as code, blast and particulate aftermath of a cabled earth’s wireless imagination *Telegraph codes extracted from The New General & Mining Telegraph Code (1891).

(Source: ELO 2017: Book of Abstracts and Catalogs)