Joel Sherwood Spring at ACMI in front of his work, DIGGERMODE, 2022 - photo by Ernesto Arriagada
Credit: Ernesto Arriagada
Stories & Ideas

Tue 03 Jan 2023

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Learn more about this work, showing as part of the How I See It: Blak Art and Film exhibition at ACMI.

Transcript

I'm interested in why the camera and these particular shots create meaning about particular ideas. I'm interested in the stuff that makes up the process of the discipline and the idea.

My name's Joel Sherwood Spring. I'm a Wiradjuri artist based on Gadigal/Wangal country in the Eora Nation. I am a part of the exhibition How I See It: Blak Art and Film.

I am producing a video work called DIGGERMODE. One of the main questions in DIGGERMODE is the ways in which materials like physical stuff are implicated in the ways that we imagine the world; how we might engage with materials differently if we think about their provenance and where they come from, where they're extracted from, and what that means going forward.

It's interesting to experiment with the ways in which we represent technology and the technological advancements that bring us shiny, high definition, interesting, thought provoking images.

Can you bring an AI into recognition of itself as being made up of lithium extracted from Noongar Boodja? And why is it that we afford personality and humour and ideas to these very new things that are mainly made up of electrical signals and rocks? Why is it more socially acceptable to think that an AI has feelings and thoughts than a tree?

The body is always close. The body is always near to these things. We are in relation with this stuff in a way that could be different because the ways that we relate to them now are constructed.

If it's just the ideological construction and we want to continue to live on this planet, then we need to think more deeply about how we relate to our material world.

Learn more about the work

How I See It: Blak Art and Film

Meet more artists featured in this exhibition

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