IMPOTENT ISLAND

Chris MacInnes

For the second part of our New Weird mini series Chris MacInnes shares Impotent Island, an installation that’s been adapted for audio broadcast. In the 11 minute audio we listen to MacInnes’ narration collapse time, connecting cosmology at a planetary scale to Sheffield’s historical industrialisation through the extraction of coal, the heat of steam and their impact within the anthropocene. Together we discuss what role weird has here, reflecting on the changing labour patterns from the industrial era to contemporary neoliberalism such the restriction of workers’ movements to the efficiency of steam engines, or influencers being caught between human labour and digital technologies. Through the shifting scales of time in Google street view, altering dimensions via dioramas in MacInnes’ installation or the construction of Northern masculinity, we delve into key concepts of chaos theory to translate how we might place within a world right is rapidly transferring the skills of humans to machines.

References mentioned in the episode:

- Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers, Order Out of Chaos (Chris quoted p115)
- Manuel de Landa, 1000 Years of Non-Linear History
- The Don Engine: https://www.sheffieldmuseums.org.uk/whats-on/river-don-engine
- Tommy Sissons, A Small Man's England

Bio:

Chris MacInnes is a British American artist raised in Sheffield. He uses a myriad of technologies and technical skills to unpick, poke and test the complex planetary networks that bind together universal facts and local phenomena. MacInnes has used game engines, server deployment, multiplayer environments, physical computing, web scraping and AI to tug at the mesh work of a networked world.

You can read the full transcript of this episode here.