Mer/Maggie Roberts/ 0rphan Drift: “Rituals in Liquidity” (1:41:52)
Department of Visual Cultures, Goldsmiths
For the second talk during her Research Fellowship, Maggie Roberts aka Mer presented two 0rphan Drift projects, Black Waters ghost prescient (2015) and Unruly City (2016), discussing them both as collaborations with the unknown (hyperobjects, ancient and futural machines and predictive technologies). These videos chart a course through a shifting urban imaginary emerging in the shadow of climate change and bio-capital, creating an amalgamation of potential spaces, materialities and creaturely life.
We are reestablishing ritual as a methodology for the intensification of the work, which has to engage with focused urgency in the world. Harnessed to affective power, the image becomes a channeling device, an uncanny operator exposing the energy circuits that catalyse change. Employing tactics of metonymic slippage, mimetic contagion, mesmerism and awkward collaged animation, 0D’s liquefaction aesthetic describes magnetic oceans, permeable thresholds between the concrete and the virtual; continuous states of radical uncertainty; invisible currents and currencies affecting the visible: cosmic and geological time scales; ‘Machine Vision’; shamanic animal becomings; communication currents in vibrant matter that become effective frequencies in our habitats and fantasies; futurity impacting on the present and its hyperobjects, and Climate Change as the violence of excess and luxury.
