White Mountain
Emma Charles (GB)
16mm film transferred to HD video, 2016
Set in Pionen data centre, a former Cold War era civil defence bunker buried 30 metres underground in Stockholm which house servers for clients that at one point included Wikileaks and The PirateBay. As the camera idles on the florescent-lit server stacks, issues of privacy, surveillance and digital sovereignty inevitably emanate. Part Bond villain lair, part retro-futuristic spaceship, the 16mm film plays on this science fiction aesthetic to explores the temporal nature of data space and geology.
Gathering vibrational and electromagnetic sound from the rock face above the data center as well as deep inside the server room itself, a soundscape has been created both revealing and processing the reverberations of the hidden environment.
Emma Charles (UK), born in 1985, is a London-based artist. Working with photography, sound and moving image, her practice explores the way contemporary value systems of time, productivity and labour are altered through technological progress. Recently Emma has situated her research towards the materiality of the Internet. Emma holds a MA in Photography from Royal College of Art. She has exhibited and screened at Serpentine Galleries, London; ZKM, Karlsruhe; HKW, Berlin; Jeu de Paume, Paris, LUX and ICA, London and is the recipient of a 2016 Arts Council England award, ZKM commission and has been published in “Reset Modernity!” edited by Bruno Latour (MIT Press).
