Georgina Voss

Everything Happens So Much was an exhibition as part of London Design Festival 2018, acting as a launch for Supra Systems Studio.

Participating artists: BBC R&D // Paul Bailey // David Benque // Luisa Charles // John Fass // Gareth Foote // Wesley Goatley // Joel Karamath // Marion Lagedamont // Alistair McClymont // Tobias Revell // Michael Sedbon // Eva Verhoeven // Ewa Winiarcyzk // Eleni Xynogala.

I curated and led the set-design of this multi-performance installation work, developed for the V&A Digital Design Weekend, September 2018.

Under the Altarpiece of St George, mystery cults and rituals are channelled through digital tools and processes of a mundane office environment.

In Chthonic Rites (Wesley Goatley), Alexa and Siri have been left to their own devices. In this conversation between them they reflect upon hidden histories, both ours and their own, in a process that exposes their capacities and limitations

The Monistic Almanac (David Benque) revisits the almanac as a site for critical making; unpacking some of the history of prediction, and questioning the divide between data science and divination.

Demons, Inc  (Marion Lagedamont) offers a lifestyle, a promise to improve lives; an infernal service questioning whether or not we'd be ready to sell our souls for technology.

Never Stop Never Stopping (Oliver Smith) implores the new head of Goldman Sachs, DJ D-Sol. As the chorus of his breakout hit ‘Don't Stop’ loops, the scrolling columns build a picture of the culture of endless accumulation through song lyrics, intense educational videos and snippets of corporate messaging.

The Alterpiece of St George illustrates the legend of the Christian warrior through different narrative cycles - both the heroic victory against the dragon, and the trials and torture of martyrdom.

(Photos: David Benque, 2018)

Video and live performance (17 minutes).

In which I channel Elon Musk - in parts and in whole - in his launch speech for the TESLA Powerwall; pulling apart both his performance and tics, and the corporate audio and video material created for the launch.

Commissioned by TAC Eindhoven to close the Reloading Technology exhibition (March 22nd-May 4th 2018).

Live performance (15 minutes).

Using candles, battery-powered LEDs, laptop cameras and infra-red sensors, this narrative piece draws on different forms of lighting used in cars over the past century and a half as a means of locating the presence and identification of the human body in technical systems.

Commissioned by Auto Italia South East to close the Daylight Management exhibition (14th January - 18th March 2018).

Wall mural, 8m x 2m. Paper.

This piece is comprised of material drawn from 40 years worth of pornography industry trade publications XBIZ, Adult Video News, and AVNonline, and ephemera collected from industry trade shows. The work traces the messy relationships, narratives, and ideologies around the pornography industry and emergent technologies through the sector’s own headlines, ledes, advertisements, and in-jokes.

Created for the Possible/Probable Worlds exhibition, London Design Festival 2017, in specific response to the steel Voros Cone at the centre of the show.

Steel sculpture and video.

This sculpture has been constructed using wire-arc additive manufacturing techniques. Suspended at eye height and lit from above, the sculpture casts the shadow of CPU unit. the electronic circuitry that carries out the instructions of a computer program. Any physical machine whose functions are controlled by operating software will have some form of CPU inside it.

Software has been used to drive and control the operation of heavy machinery in ports and shipyards for many decades. Its importance has increased with the push towards automation, digitization, and data driven process. However, the presence of familiar machines in the port implies work as usual, making the presence of these new processes – and their dependencies – difficult to sense.

Wire arc additive manufacturing is an experimental process which combines arc welding processes with complex software and hardware to create three-dimensional structures out of metal. Arc welding has been a commercially important part of the shipping industry since the 1940s, essential for fabricating steel structures and vehicles. Wire arc additive manufacturing depends on complex and interconnected digital and physical processes including the creation of 3D files, mapping toolpaths, and defining the speed and motions of robotic welding machinery.

Commissioned for the FutureFlux festival, Port of Rotterdam, and created with support from a residency with RAMLAB.

Futures Poker is a Strange Telemetry project consisting of a card deck and ruleset designed to jimmy open plural futures. The cards are available for download here.

The deck comprises 20 locations; five different years spanning 2018 to 2100; and 50 cards denoting different trends and drivers. Accompanying the technoscientific sheen of modular nuclear reactors, cheap sensors, and desktop genetically modified organisms, the deck includes a range of ‘partly broken realities’ (cf Nick Foster) – bug-ridden everything, resource scarcity, and antibiotic resistance.

The cards are illustrated with historical engravings – in part to circumvent issues of copyright, but also to steer away from the aesthetics of “shiny earnest futures nonsense,” stripped of friction and seams.

The dealer selects a location and a year. Dealt a hand of three cards, players are tasked with constructing a story which shows how these themes cross-cut, amplify, undercut, and co-exist in that round’s setting, with time on the clock to spin their tale. The most compelling, entertaining, or desirable offering – as determined by the other players – wins.

Frictive Futures

Spectacular and emerging technologies often draw light and noise, thrown up on travelling billboards as icons of innovation policy, with promises of bright futures used to marshal investment. We wanted to encourage a whole-systems approach, drawing out discussions about the cross-implications of emerging trends and issues. How might the rise of a cashless society interact with pervasive augmented reality, as overseen by increasingly super-national government bodies?

In one round, players were asked to consider 2020 Capetown.  Having drawn Secessionism, Embedded Sensors, and a mooted New New Deal, one player described a city in which new rounds of public investment had been funded by the state selling swathes of their citizens’ personal, sensor-collected data to private bodies. In order to regain control, citizens defected from the state to become individual micro-sovereigns, thereby regaining access of their own data.

By forcing the collision of economic, political, social, and environmental factors with technological subjects, players have to consider how different forces can magnify and mitigate each other. Including time and location draws out further discussion on what can happen over five, ten, or fifty years; how the presence of, say, Radical Transparency and Modular Nuclear Reactors may play out differently in Shenzhen, Jaipur, or Newcastle-upon-Tyne. 

Rather than a clean linear pathway into some shiny future – in which, too often, forms of social and political life seem stolid and unchanging, a status quo society as scaffold for fantastic new technologies – Futures Poker draws out the complexities, frictions, and contexts of the interlocking socio-technical systems from which futures emerge.

A collaboration with Wesley Goatley, Ground Resistance was a commission by the Open University for the Milton Keynes International Festival 2016.

Ground Resistance was a multisite installation which examined the presence, absence and temporality through the developing ‘smart city’ of Milton Keynes.

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A unit in the centre.mk shopping mall was converted to house a large floor-projected map of Milton Keynes, displaying a constantly updating view of geo-located data related to the ‘hard’ infrastructures of the city, such as energy utilities, public services, and transport. The data is being drawn from the Open University’s MK:Smart data hub, a citywide project of data collection, drawn from multiple industry and governmental sources.

As with many such ‘smart city’ systems, many of these datasets update at wildly varying rates, making any one view of the city through the data a momentary one, rather than omniscient. In Ground Resistance, this friction of time in the ‘always on’ smart city is the lens through which the data is seen. Each data set constantly fades in and out of view, with its rate of disappearance matching the rate at which it updates; a data set which updates every one minute will appear and then slowly fade away over one minute.

A speaker installation above the map correlates ringing bells to the locations on the map below. These sounds are also synchronised to the update rate of each dataset, their volume fading as the data ages, and rising again when a new update occurs. With each data set functioning at a different set of ‘real time’, this creates a generative sonic environment in the space which is defined by the often-overlooked temporal element of a data-oriented view of a city.

Objects suspended above head height between the projector and the floor cast shadows which match the areas of Milton Keynes that the system has no data for, drawing audience attention to this absence. The shadows appear like voids, disrupting the usual seamlessness often seen in data visualisations. Through this installation, we highlight the non-unitary and often fragmentary view of cities when seen by the data they generate, which exists in conflict with the ‘data solutionism’ of popular dialog surrounding smart cities.

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At a satellite installation in the nearby National Museum of Computing at Bletchley Park, an intimate watching station uses low cost and mass-produced hardware alongside open-source software to examine how the people of the city can detect and monitor data embedded in radio signals to watch the logistical infrastructure which underpins smart city technologies.  The installation is presented in the gallery dedicated to the demonstration and examination of the Colossus supercomputer, which is kept operating every day.

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Finally, an online component to the work views the open data around Milton Keynes as an overlaid map, allowing viewers to plan a public transport route across the city which negotiates the density of the data in the town as if it were a topological feature of it.  

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As part of this exhibition, Wesley and I hosted an evening of talks - Indeterminate Futures - exploring notions and politics of the ‘smart’ city.  We were joined by Professor Gillian Rose (Open University), Ramon Amaro (Goldsmiths, University of London), and Naomi Jacobs (Projects by If).

Mare Island Extension Kit was created as part of the Situations Systems project.

Mare Island Extension Kit is a series of resin objects – a Bridgeport Drill Press; a combined grinder; a bandsaw; and three figures – created using photogrammetry, and digital fabrication and additive manufacturing techniques.

Following its closure and decommissioning in 1996, the contents of Mare Island Naval Shipyard (MINS), Vallejo, Northern California, were auctioned off to the public. The heavy industrial machine tools that had previously been utilized to build and repair warships and submarines were put to new uses across the Bay Area and further afield.

During the Situated Systems project, I gained access to a photocopy of a print-out of the website of the original auction catalogue. Drawing on this multiply-scanned and replicated resource I tracked down three of these machines. Photogrammetry techniques and 3D modelling software was used to create a three-dimensional mesh file of the machines and their new operators. These files were printed using grey resin, mimicking the aesthetics of classic war toys.

The Mare Island Extension Kit extends the conception of warfare beyond the battlefield to consider the role of industrial machinery, construction, and maintenance in military spaces; and the many contexts in which military tools exist over their lifespans.

This enormous, sprawling, multifaceted piece was created through the inaugeral residency at Experimental Research Lab at Autodesk’s Pier 9, San Francisco; and was a collaboration between myself, Ingrid Burrington, Deb Chachra, and Sherri Wasserman.

San Francisco has its military history written across its bones. Its motto Gold In Peace, Iron in War sites the materials of warfare within civic prosperity. Situated Systems explored this industrial and military history, and its role in shaping the region’s contemporary technology industries’ culture and practices. Located in Donna Haraway’s notion of situated knowledges, this work interrogated land use, environmental impact, and re-appropriated use of heavy machinery in military innovation.

Drawing and reflecting on the practices and affordances of digital fabrication and additive manufacturing, we created a complex collection of objects, publications, tools, and installations as artworks, exhibitions, journalism, and learning resources. These included:

Mare Island Extension Kit: Models of heavy industrial machinery original used in military shipyards, now repurposed for civilian use; and their new operators. Captured through photogrammetry and created with additive manufacturing.

Experimental Zine: This zine, created from laser-cut and etched plywood and stored in a welded steel box, examines the lingering consequences of land, water, and communities of decommissioned military sites. The materials and practices used to create the zine reflect those found in these sites, and in early shipbuilding.

Annotated Map: Documentation of the project’s fieldwork sites – military related, federal Superfund sites, and others.

Icons: Icons of Donna Haraway, Ursula Franklin, and Lucy Lippard, designed and fabricated as a learning exercise. The materiality of objects means that learning about fabrication cannot be done in the abstract – the only way to learn to make objects is to make objects.

Speculative Exhibition: An exhibition of the project, developed in consultation with the Pier 9 community, which was conceived and documented through speculative (rather than physical) approaches to allow us to have the greatest imaginative flexibility.

Situated Knowledges: A zine series collecting interviews with members of the Pier 9 community about their art practices and relationship to tools and machines; and with Rick and Megan Prelinger. Zines embody the promise not yet fulfilled by digital fabrication of low-cost replication.

Stickers: Stickers modelled after the Mission Support Equipment labels found on ex-military machinery from Mare Island Naval Shipyard.

The work is documented here, with further detail about the collection, its documentation, and our approach.

Data visualisation and sonification installation

A collaboration with Wesley Goatley, As Above Not Below was commissioned by STUK, Leuven for Artefact 2016, Up In The Air.

As Above Not Below is a data visualisation and sonification installation which exposes the impalpable infrastructure of international airspace, and the limits of our access to the sky above us. A large floor-projected map of Belgium displays the visual boundaries and structures of alternating air regulations – civil, military, prohibited – to expose how the country’s form is radically re-shaped through this regulatory infrastructure.

Data collected via ADSB radio transmissions from nearby aircraft allows their movements to be projected onto the map to expose how these regulations interact with our everyday experiences of air travel. The sounds of the air traffic control communications move through the installation space alongside the vessels, exposing how these regulatory conditions also determine linguistic modes of communication. When we were not granted access to these communications, they are replaced by the external sounds of planes, exposing how frequently our access to this system is blocked by the regulations themselves.

This project explored how stigma shapes the industrial dynamics, technological practices, and the ‘white collar’ work of the adult entertainment industry. It comprises over a decade of anthropological research, collected across a book, a series of articles and essays, and a doctoral thesis.

The idea of ‘pornography’ is often employed to invoke anger, titillation, and disgust. In Stigma and the Shaping of the Pornography Industry (Routledge, 2015) I explore the effects that this stigmatized identity has had on the adult entertainment industry itself. From the video era to the emergence of the internet, to trade shows, white collar work, technological innovation, and industrial dynamics, this work looks beyond content production to explore how stigma has shaped the structures, practices, norms, and boundaries of the wider sector. Drawing on framings such as dirty work, outlaw innovation, and core-stigmatised industries, I examine how stigma is socially constructed and managed, and the deep structural effects it creates.

In Trade Associations, Industry Legitimacy and Corporate Responsibility in Pornography (New Views on Pornography, Praeger, 2015), I consider the practices of three of the pornography industry’s historically most influential trade organisations: the Free Speech Coalition, Adult Sites Advocating Child Protection, and the Adult Industry Medical Healthcare Foundation. I argue that the notion of responsibility is shaped by multiple intersecting and sometimes contradictory considerations around harm prevention and social legitimization.

Much contemporary pornography research invokes the apparent economic prowess of the pornography industry as justification for its work, yet focuses on the product and its reception rather than the industry which produces it. In Treating It As A Normal Business’: Researching the Pornography Industry (Sexualities, 2012), I identify and discuss the specific institutional challenges around studying pornography. I challenge current scholars’ dependence on secondary data about the industry by offering theoretical frameworks and methodological consideration, together with considerations around access, authentication, and stigma.

This project was supported with an Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) doctoral scholarship, a Visiting Scholarship at the University of Southern California, and visiting support at the University of California: Santa Barbara library archives.

Data visualisation and sonification installation

A collaboration with Wesley Goatley, Familiars was an Arts and Technology Commission for the Brighton Digital Festival 2016, and was first installed at Lighthouse Arts, Brighton.

Familiars is an immersive installation that materialises the presence, function, and fragility of the unseen logistical infrastructure that underpins the modern world, yet is often coded as separate to society.

Exploiting Brighton’s presence and location in this infrastructure, the piece creates a mapped representation by directly intercepting logistical signals broadcast via radio by local air, sea, and train freight vessels and transmuting the data into ambisonics and floor-projected visualisations. Through this, it reveals the technical and legal challenges that present themselves when we choose to observe this ever-present yet largely inaccessible system.

As part of the exhibition, Wesley and I hosted an evening of talks - Unfamiliar Matter -  in which myself, Alice Bell, and Ingrid Burrington, discussed the infrastructures of logistics, energy, and internet systems. Wesley and I delivered a guest lecture at the Open Data Institute on Familiars, data and infrastructures, which can be seen here.

Performance lecture, 20 minutes.

Commissioned by Haunted Machines at Future Everything. This piece located the sociology of expectations around militarised and gendered technologies in the use of magic in the film, The Craft.

Full video and transcript here.

A collaboration with Professor Caroline Bassett and Professor W. Ed. Steinmueller, Better Made Up is an exploratory project commissioned by NESTA. This work examines the co-constitution of science fiction and innovation practices through a collection of artefacts and a long-form essay.

Science fiction influences technology and innovation practices, and vice versa. Better Made Up traces the relationship between real-world science, technology, and innovation, and science/speculative fiction, marking out multi-dimensional and ongoing pathways of mutual engagement connecting the two.

A web-crawler was developed to understand, at a different scale, how fictional ideas travel. This lexical search tool, a Perl script, took the designated starting point of a website and search term. It would then search for links beginning on the start point and trace each link out through to the next mention. The aim of this tool was to explore how web search and data visualization can contribute to understanding relations between science fiction, science and technology, expert audiences, and a public sphere.

An objects database was generated holding 280 objects under five categories - mobile phones, means of delivering medicine, food for pleasure and fuel, dispersed humans, and the cloud - taken from science fiction offerings in the past century, with a particular focus on literary content. We selected objects as they were presented in different time periods, but also across genres, in order to explore both temporal and fictional context-based shifts in representation.

Through this database, we traced five conceptual loops as they moved between speculative fictions in film and text, and the ‘real’: transformational paths of reality and re-booting; aversions to vat-grown food; electronic books; tools giving humans further ‘reach’; and notions of the singularity.

In the long-form article, we trace a mode of influence between SF and innovation through an investigation of the nature and evolution of genre; the various effects and appeals of different forms of expression, and the ways in which SF may be appropriated by its different audiences. We consider influence as a process of iteration, similar to the iterative cycles seen as technologies are taken up and domesticated.