Core Dump, 2018-2019. 4 channel video and e-waste installation. 46 min (video, loop). Dimensions variable (installation)

Camera: Anton Scholtz, Cleophee Moses. Featuring: Bamba Diagne, Darly Mbudi, Chen Qiheng, and Amita Ye Feng. Sound Design: Caydon van Eck

A video series supported by the Digital Earth Fellowship, Hivos, SIDA, The British Council, and the TURN fund of the German Federal Cultural Foundation. Produced in cooperation with Ker Thiossane (Dakar) Wits Art Museum (Johannesburg) and ZKM

Installation supported by the 12th Seoul Mediacity Biennale. Courtesy of the artist.

Core Dump is a series of videos set in Kinshasa, Shenzhen, New York, and Dakar―four cities intertwined in a complex web of fiber-optic cables, migratory patterns, conflicting histories, river systems, and trade routes. Originating from a project that traverses continents, the work explores the ecology of global information technology, including places of material origin, production, consumption, and distribution as well as disposal treatment, aiming to reveal the digital virtuality of capitalism. This journey surveys the possibilities of inverting the colonial culture of extraction by documenting it in the form of a fictional geopolitical map. Knoetze’s four videos incorporate a mixture of found footage, performance documentation, and interview transcripts that collectively portrays a digital nervous system on the brink of collapse amid a collision of uncertainty and unsustainability. In this work, video and audio forge a distinct sense of time and space while foregrounding notions of digital technology, cybernetics, colonialism, and the Non-Aligned Movement, thereby underlining human connection and the significance of the narrative.

The work is powerful and complex body of work with multiple forms of media and approaches to mapping and locality that foreground the technological circuits and routes that constitute daily life, as well as their manifestations in very different ways in different places. The work explores multiple layers of the historical, economic cultural and political backgrounds of contemporary technological infrastructures, which collectively resonate with the aesthetics of this Biennale’s non-territorial mapping. Also, the e-waste reused in the work’s installation provokes not only the issues of extraction and advanced capitalism but also the inter-relationships and responsibilities of each entity living in this world, thereby fundamentally revealing the uncertainty of our lives. The site-specific and ‘recycled’ installation also provides a reflective notion of future art-making.