Elk_Agent
Emerging from research into the temporal and energetic histories of Irish bogs, Elk_Agent is a real-time rendered CGI film following the parallel digital existence of a 3D scanned prehistoric Irish Elk skeleton.
Painter Barrie Cooke described the Irish Elk as a ‘symbol of pre-civilised consciousness’, its antlers like ‘massive antennae transmitting, as it were, a message from the past.’ Elk_Agent receives this transmission now as a weird digital signal. Its glitching gait shows a scrambling of incomputable data between the past:present:future.
Colloquially known as the Irish Elk for the many specimens found in Irish bogs, Megaloceros Giganteus roamed the plains of Europe for nearly 400,000 years, before its extinction around 10,000 years ago, due to a changing environment. Since the 17th century, they have been unearthed from their boggy strata as the peatbog was cut away for fuel and cleared for agriculture, industry and energy.
Today the same historic bog lands are patches of multiple futures, where rewetted and conserved spaces fractal into sites of energy infrastructure, nearly a quarter of which fuels data centres. It is in these infrastructures that the Irish Elk’s digital double is folded into, and wanders through.
Using a game engine and machine learning trained on the approximate weights and physics of the bones, the elk's movement has been interpreted through code to reanimate and reorient itself in an alien digital space it never evolved for, but now has a parallel existence within.
Viewers are invited to sit with the Elk and observe its wanderings through an endlessly generating CGI landscape.
The physical skeleton was scanned by, and is housed in, the Geology & Palaeontology Dept., Vienna Museum of Natural History. Found in an Irish bog in 1860, it dates to the Late Pleistocene (ca. 12,000 years old). Its digital double was uploaded to Sketchfab in 2021; used here under CC BY-NC 4.0.
This piece is part of an on-going practice-led Masters by Research in IADT, through a scholarship from TU Rise Elevate.
Location: Bay 1, The Digital Hub
Exhibition Dates + Times: 6-22nd of November, Wednesday to Sundays, 12-6pm
Artist Name/s (Pronoun/s): 1iing heane
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