Volcano

This publication produced for the exhibition Volcano at Platform, London, intertwines scientific visualization, speculative fiction, and special effects to legitimize inquiries into speculative world-building.

It is only with these findings in mind that we can address the present controversy, that surrounding the discovery of the MARSH archives. Here we find two communication devices of the type known as ‘video art’, both containing traces of Xenuist animism. A surviving fragment from the archaic filing system ‘exhibition catalogue’, attributed to a P.G. Kollectiv, makes the following statement about the artifacts: “Marsh appropriates data collected by NASA and Jet Propulsion Lab’s Thermal Infrared Multispectral Scanner and transforms it into a living landscape, a haunting sense that between the fluorescent greens and luscious purples of the volcano’s seemingly dormant terrain something is pulsing into life, not just a panoramic view tracked by the simulation of the giddy camera movement but the portrait of a presence coming alive in reaction to its seductive dance. Rather than explore the virtual, both Volcano and Crater document the way sheer complexity can transform pure data into something approximating an organism… [a stain that has been analysed as a combination of tomato, basil and yeast – probably a twenty first century delicacy – obscures the following lines] The mediation of the camera turns Mt. St. Helens from a place that can be quantified, mapped, to the site of a spatial performance in which the viewer is as much a participant as the crater and the volcano. What begins as an almost scientific description of an object becomes, through acceleration and disorientation, an experience that exists beyond the object. From the total entropy of objective data, Marsh creates life by introducing the subjectivity that arises from disorder”.