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Dust to data / Larry Achiampong & David Blandy. In copyright. Source: Wellcome Collection.
"Genetic Automata is a four-part series of video installations. The third, Dust to Data, examines the colonial history of archaeology and its present parallels in the data mining of DNA and social media image banks; the scraping of dirt from archaeological digs becoming the scraping of data from the virtual cloud. Both sets of discourse and activity act around the construction of a "civilisation" and the construction of "origins" stories, defining people into categories, some as human and neutral, others as non-human and/or abnormal. The script includes a fragment of a letter from William Du Bois, author of the "The Souls of Black Folk" to one of the progenitors of modern archaeology, William Petrie. Eugenics was at the heart of Egyptology, seeking scientific justification for prejudice through measurement and statistical analysis. Galton, father of Eugenics and the discipline of statistics, was a supporter of Petrie, funding several of his Egyptian expeditions. Petrie measured triangles to calculate the volume of cranial cavities of skulls, which he then used to justify assertions about white supremacy. Contemporaries of Petrie, Cicely D. Fawcett and Alice Lee, pulled apart both his thesis and the methodology. The triangle, a rotating gleaming pyramid, acts as recurring theme in Dust to Data, an image of order and hard simplicity. Eugenics was integral to the birth of archaeology, and still permeates assumptions within the field and in wider culture to today, with the Western scientific framework, based on Carl Linnaeus' classification system, where boundaries are formed, assigning labels in order to sort and define. Primary school children still learn about his research but there is no requirement for teachers to reference his racist ideology. The film features several 3D models of Australopithecine skulls, of extinct close relatives of humans who lived around two million years ago, captured using photogrammetry, including the famous "Black skull" of Paranthropus aethiopicus, discovered in 1985. Racism is a construct born of pseudo-science, and to this day racism influences social interactions and social systems, science and culture meeting through the depiction of stereotypes. History shows that whether biblical stories are presented through film, through to hero-based events illustrated in the form of videogames, the white-saviour-as-default-archetype prevails and even algorithms embedded in the very computers, apps and software we use. The artists confront the myth(s) of cultural and physical whiteness and its deeply troubling past, and how these ideas regarding origin underpin the white-supremacist foundations that are embedded throughout today's institutions, and especially through our digital lives (i.e. the relationship between social media, apps, filters and more and their connection with being weaponised by the surveillance state), revealing a complex history that confounds concepts of genetic and cultural labelling, thus creating fractious boundaries that exist in the contemporary world."-- Summarised from the artists' statement.
"'Genetic Automata' is an ongoing body of video works by artists Larry Achiampong and David Blandy, exploring race and identity in an age of avatars, videogames and DNA ancestry. The series investigates where deeply ingrained ideas about race come from and the role that science has played in shaping these perceptions."-- From website. https://wellcomecollection.org/exhibitions/ZAW0PxQAACcG-pX8