DARK CONTINENT: MNEMESOID / SERPENTINE GALLERIES 2016

This chapter from Dark Continent is told through Mnemesoid, an open source software programme named after Mnemosyne, mother of the 9 muses and the symbolic embodiment of memory in Greek mythology, the software was created as an interface for ‘The Eternal Cortex Project’, an aggregated, almost infinite database of experience. Mnemesoid renders the input of language, image and fiction into high fidelity, sensory information that can be experienced from the POV of self, other, animal or object.  

In this chapter Mnemesoid is at the point of the ‘Heat Death of the Universe’, a popular 20th century cosmological hypothesis about the ultimate fate of the universe, this serves as a construct to conceptualise the end of time or a strange circularity where the end touches the beginning in a singularity. This is also an aid to imagine the paradox of the immaterial software within the collapse of matter. 

With no input, Mnemesoid replays moments on the limit of experience that have defied its capacity to produce a satisfactory sensory dimension, moments of intense touch, love; erotic and spiritual and self-consciousness.  

In this chapter Mnemesoid is both narrator and Oracle.

‘Dark Continent Productions’ is an on-going project that proposes an allegorical city of women populated by composite, symbolic protagonists that embody excess and examine 'feminine' subjectivity and experience as well as the potentials of a realism defined by excess and the irrational, qualities traditionally surrounding notions of “femininity”. The ‘feminine’ not as female but as "a kind of radical otherness to any conception of the real". It is a city that is simultaneously internal and geographic, past and future, part ruin, part becoming, a city in time but not in space. 

The project is iterated through disparate installations, films and performances that together form a mythology that conceptualises the ‘epic’ as a form test the potentials of feminist politics and ideologies, a platform to critique the current structures, norms and gender constructs, and imagine a post-patriarchal world.