“”I’m not an artist, I’m an architect.’ The agent didn’t seem to care for the difference.”
Furthering his notion of net-concréte, the act of metabolizing one’s internet surroundings ala The Age of Earthquakes, frequent Holly Herndon collaborator, Mat Dryhurst has taken on the task of creating reality-testing art. The ontology or collective moment of experience is twisted into a participatory super-situation as his work is apparently derived from “human investigation versus algorithmic mining.”
The narrative platform, being an axis upon which connections/data points can be assembled, was constructed from publicly available online information, gathered from “a closed target group of subjects.” Ostensibly, surveillance activated. Politically geared theater of the meta-Real unwound.
Dryhurst insists, in his own words that, “Distinction is important for this because this is exactly the kind of work/contextual connections an algorithm currently can not make. Which is important to understand as a line of defense in an impending AI war.”
Science fiction has always been a genre that’s a had one foot steeped in reality while the other ganders forward into the unknown — though the future is able to be approximated. But with ‘Mine’, Dryhurst has ultimately built a Brechtian radioplay aimed at mining the totems of our present Internet activity to create something both reflective and revelatory, a collapsed future-present. Improvisational algorithmic gestures combined with the kinky curvature of comedic commentary: one part Florian Hecker, one part Chris Morris.
• Mat Dryhurst: https://soundcloud.com/matdryhurst
More about: Mat Dryhurst
