Meeting the Lough On Its Own Terms, PS² (Belfast) 2025
A partnership with Friends of the Earth, Digital Art Studios, Sonic Arts Research Centre and PS² (Belfast), and Banner Repeater (London)
In the long hot summer of 2023, Lough Neagh became overwhelmed with algae blooms to such an extent that the vibrant green images of the blue green algae went viral, making international headlines. Once a site of great abundance, supplying (as it still does) 40% of all drinking water to NI, with eel fishing famously being passed down through generations over centuries, the complexity of how the Lough became eutrophic presents a textbook case in converging dynamics of power, influence, and conflicts of interest, that have also developed over decades, if not centuries, around Lough Neagh and the watershed.
Algae blooms offer a symptom of the climate crisis that emphasises the interconnectedness of vulnerable ecosystems with human-made systems. The microbial scale of the cyanobacteria (blue green algae) is important in allowing us to cut through the complexity, drawing our attention to certain indisputable material facts that show that there is simply too much phosphorous in Lough Neagh, at which point we can start to dismantle everything that makes it this way. It’s all about the nutrients. Our focus at the microbial scale has the potential to lead to a paradigm shift in thinking; a gut feeling, as we start to understand our relationship to nature in a more de-centred way. As just one species amongst the multitudes that live within the vulnerable eco-system of Lough Neagh, vital to finding a more sustainable equilibrium.
A new work by Ami Clarke for Beyond Matter, ZKM, considers the interdependencies that ripple through biomedia and the online mediasphere, as boundaries blur across the zoonotic spillover of the pandemic and epidemiologists advise economic strategies, and existing inequalities come to the fore fast.
An online dashboard informs the VR work that draws out the contradictions within data practice today, that come to light between the unprecedented, but potentially vital ‘surveillance’ of track and trace, designed to manage risk via modulating the flow of bodies within a viral environment, amid concerns regarding how the accompanying data analysis informs the state and other players, as well as the markets.
Pandemonium (working title) is a new work by Ami Clarke, commissioned by Radar for Risk Related and subject to further development through Clarke's residency at ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe in May 2021. It forms part of an ongoing body of work by Clarke exploring probability and risk within surveillance/disaster capitalism from a trans-feminist post-human position. With these themes finding an inadvertently timely focus with the spread of COVID-19, it draws on her investigation into the faultlines of disaster capitalism via the enmeshed ecologies of media, finance and the environment—underpinned as they are by the neoliberal paradigm of financialisation and privatisation—in both the short-term of the pandemic, and the longer-term of ongoing environmental concerns.
See the work and read the article at Radar, Loughborough’s website
—a pharmakon: part poison / part cure
Pharmacia (Pharmakeia) is also a common noun signifying the administration of the pharmakon, the drug: the medicine and/or poison… socrates compares the written text Phaedrus has brought along to a drug (pharmakon). The pharmakon, this “medicine”, this philtre, which acts as both remedy and poison, already introduces islets into the body of the discourse with all its ambivalences…that which resists any philosopheme, indefinitely exceeding its bounds as nonidentity, nonessence, nonsubstance; granting philosophy by that very fact the inexhaustible adversity of what funds it and the infinite absence of what founds it.
(Preciado, Testo Junkie, 145)
An amulet holding within it the potential for infinite plasticity, as a molecular spaceship with the capacity to forge a future engineered differently to the past.
‘On Animatics’
by Jamie Sutcliffe
“…two recent projects by Adham Faramawy and Ami Clarke have built complex animatic interfaces that are receptive to both the personal and economic fluctuations of a ‘pharmaco-pornographic’ era in which rogue biochemical agents unprecedentedly affect the production and maintenance of life.”
...“The economic effects of this biopolitical transformation have been recently mapped in an impressively diagnostic way by artist Ami Clarke, whose exhibition ‘The Underlying’ at London’s Arebyte Gallery in 2019 presented a daunting image of market responses to the shifting perceptions of Bisphenol A’s (BPA) exponential presence in global water supplies and foodstuffs. A product of polycarbonate plastic production, BPA’s structural similarity to oestrogen risks unpredictable effects on human cellular and reproductive health through molecular absorption. Clarke’s film Lag Lag Lag and VR work Derivative, both 2019, fuse the financial analytics toolset of live sentiment analysis of online news feeds covering BPA with fluctuations in pollution data, the ‘health’ of the FTSE 100 and a dauntingly totemic 3D model of the chemical structure of Bisphenol A. The result is a brilliantly paranoid-critical interface that animates the codependencies of human and non-human cognition as they coevolve within the animatic apparatus.”
(Art Monthly no. 436,
May 2020)
