Swallowed Whole

“When fed back into its own artificial creator, it becomes a vessel of entropy.”

Proposed as an infinite looping of synced and generated regurgitations, Swallowed Whole takes Daniel Shanken’s The Pits and assimilates its sonic and visual input through metabolised remixes. Sinkholes become sentient, leaky data becomes sustenance.

Andrea Khôra summons the invocation of a new entity within the pit, conjured through prompting and performativity. Remixing existing footage with newly derived generative visuals, as well as a reciprocated conversational text, the pit becomes an aggregator of shared hallucination. Daniel Shanken plays the mechanical Turk lurking behind the scenes inputting live reactions to an anthropomorphised pizza box and microwave. Fed into the conversation and slowly remixing throughout the event, the new text that emerges becomes an effigy to those who bore witness.

Chris MacInnes uses image processing to probe the pit, deriving control voltages and triggers in real-time from Shanken’s video work. These will then be used to manipulate an improvised performance on custom modular synths. Cycled over a series of strange loops, each ingestion of data brings the new sonic score closer to a state of profound dysfunction.
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Andrea Khôra is an artist and researcher based in London. Her work centres around the malleability of reality on both personal and societal levels. Andrea's practice-led Ph.D. project, Under the Influence: Expanded Technologies of the Mind, investigates the intersection of expanded consciousness and hegemonic institutions through artistic research and writing.

Chris MacInnes is a British-American artist raised in Sheffield. He uses a myriad of technologies and technical skills to unpick, poke and test the complex planetary networks that bind together universal facts and local phenomena. MacInnes has used game engines, server deployment, multiplayer environments, physical computing, web-scraping and AI to tug at the mesh-work of a networked world.

Daniel Shanken is an artist whose practice centres on the interplay between technology and cognition, exploring its ongoing effects on the environment, consciousness, and culture through installations, video, sculpture, sound, and media. He has exhibited at the ICA London, Art Basel Hong Kong, Whitechapel Gallery, CCA Glasgow, Nottingham Contemporary, CFCCA Manchester, V Art Center Shanghai, and Kiasma Helsinki.  

Rebecca Edwards is a London based curator, writer and producer. Her interests include cultivating experimental curatorial methods, interweaving fluid approaches to production, dissemination and representation of artwork, and exploring the nested fields of technology, digital aesthetics and internet culture.