Hines, C. L. (2022). Natural Cycles: The Aesthetics and Architectures of Femtech. In L. Boulton, T. L. Devgun, & B. J. Engblom (Eds.), Reality Harvester: Data After Nature After Nature. Skogen.
Reality Harvester is a monument erected for a research project conducted under a pandemic in a world with increasingly torn map territory relations. It takes form as both a book and a website.
It is an extension of the reality collage we all make as we try to fill in the blanks and draw connections between memetic headlines, image macros and rotted hyperlinks, all semblances of context slowly fading.
As more and more data is harvested it begins to occlude reality and a slow, roiling data fog settles in. Metrics and KPIs start to dictate reality rather than predict it, acting as fuel for neural networks reflecting the past into the future. Data as masking reality. Data as your boss.
“We live in a world where there is more and more information, and less and less meaning”. --- This dual publication is the result of an investigation into the "data industrial complex", specifically the aesthetic and material lives of overlapping phenomena: big data and automation, labour, climate, finance and e-commerce, technological infrastructures, biometrics, behavioural science and surveillance. Over the two-year process, the group focused most specifically on the entangled representations and roles occupied by the natural world and networked digital communications in explanations of how the present is shaped.
In a book-length collaboration with designers Persson Valijani, this pandemic-adjusted inquiry is modelled alongside contributions from fields including art, architecture, media theory, urbanism, activism, ethnography, environmental humanities, human ecology, poetry and curatorial practice. A parallel interactive website maps a 'data eco-system,' offering subjective navigations between the terrains of data flow, natural resource extraction, and financial and power relations.
