Amitai Romm, Aslak Aamot Helm (Diakron) & Elvia Wilk – Scries
From the symposium, Transformative Futures at Kunsthal Charlottenborg, organised by International Center for Knowledge in the Arts, 27-28.10.2022.
This presentation takes its starting point from a collaborative effort around the artwork Scries* by Emil Rønn Andersen and the studio Diakron, the ideas behind which were developed in collaboration with writer Elvia Wilk. Scries is a video stream of indefinite length which depicts a reflective sphere within a set of changing environments. In developing this work, the artistic team were interested in remote sensing, data collection, and climate simulation as specific historical practices, and in the way these endeavors both construct and express certain paradigms for apprehending and hypothesising climate change. In the presentation, Diakron will introduce the scientific sites that they cooperated with to create the project. This will lead into a walk-through of some of the aesthetic considerations and technical constraints involved in the work. Finally, in conversation with Wilk, the presentation delves into the wider ideas that emerged from the work around the magnitudes, multitudes and expansive finitudes at work in climate science. Scries was commissioned by the 13th edition of the Shanghai Biennial: Bodies of Water that opened in 2021 at the Power Station of Art in Shanghai.
Moderated by Kristoffer Gansing
*To “scry” is to attempt to foretell the future through a reflective device, like the proverbial crystal ball. The work’s title, Scries, appropriates this term to suggest the human desire to find meaning in patterns, to understand or predict the future, to bridge future to past, to connect the human-scale and the planetary scale, and to find relationships between the psychological and the cosmological.
