BLOODY [2021]

This work is materially comprised of a 1st World War trench medics case, a camera, monitor and red cloth, while the software incorporates Machine Learning in the imaging of the live video feed.

An endoscopic camera is placed inside the light-tight medics case, with no source of light it is pitch black, in a (Konstantin) Raudive-esque setting, and sends a steady stream of this imagery to a laptop which then visualizes it. The ML element is simply sorting and rearranging blocks of these red pixels, an ordering of the chaos, which is nonetheless itself a black box operation in terms of its functioning and algorithmic choices. This dark cinema then plays out on a vertical monitor redolent of diagnostic machines.

The tableau is mediated visually by a bright red cloth, with its associations of flags, dressings, et al.

Bloody can be seen as a meditation on, and kind of psychological sketch or profile of, the intersection of technology and medicine, at the same time speaking to more submerged and unarticulated notions of warfare and disease. The work also touches on the sometimes radical sensitivity of imaging instruments and in turn the algorithms they run.