Tomb keepers (rise)
TOMB KEEPERS (Rise)
2024
3D Animation with Sound, Slumped glass, wire, projection, 4D animation, sound, oxidized copper PLA print, copper-leafed PLA print, nickel-plated PLA print, dyed nylon print, powder coated PLA print, cast glass. Approximately 144 x 72 inches (365.75 x 182.9 cm), Runtime: 25:39,
Tomb Keepers (Rise) considers the contentious extractive practice of deep sea mining for polymetallic nodules (bundles of rare metals like copper, cobalt, and nickel that live on the ocean floor.) Some take as long as 500 million years to grow and are essential structures in the deep sea environment. We are mining them for use in solar cells, laptop and cellphone batteries and other technological devices. The work considers the complex web of relations that orbit the nodule: international seabed regulation, comb jelly ontologies, millennia of marine life and death, the green revolution, the constant upgrading of our devices, and the ocean’s role in climate change mitigation. It asks what origin stories are in the process of being created, and whose abyssal ghosts witness the destruction we incite.
Made in 3D animation and 3D fabrication the piece builds narrative through a stitching of photogrammetry models of deep sea hydrothermal vents, scans of polymetallic nodules, and models of mining equipment. With voiceover by Kira Xonorika, the work weaves a web of relations across time and space, analog and digital, and terrestrial and marine ways of being.
Digital Fabrication Assistant: Devin Wilson (Speculative Prototyping Lab, UCI)
3D Modeling Assistant: Emily Lopez
Voiceover: Kira Xonorika (Artist)
Special thanks to: Hiromi Takizawa (CSF) for glass casting support, Moronke Harris (Founder, The Imaginative Scientist) for providing scientific consultation
and Taylor Griffith (Artist) for lending polymetallic nodules.
Exhibition: Transformative Currents: Art and Action in the Pacific Ocean, Oceanside Museum of Art, August 2024 - January 2025, Curated by Cassandra Coblentz, Aaron Katezman and Ziying Duan for the Getty's PST Art + Science 2024
