“Nature,” William James said, “is but another name we give to excess.” Once seemingly endlessly abundant, life on earth has been revealed in its fragility and ephemerality. Our computational systems, meanwhile, processing endless layers of data, seem ever more like that natural excess of which James wrote. Reliant on rare-earth elements, these machines are in the world they strive to replace and reproduce. The works in this exhibition explore paradoxes of computers-as-nature: through the dark abundance of computed extinction, the uncanny vitality of sensors and circuits, and the otherworldliness of simulation.

Earth Measurer
Matthew Battles

Reflexive Structures
Kim Albrecht

alt’ai
Qiao Lin, Paul Heinicker, Daria Stupina & Lukáš Likavčan

A metalab(at)harvard exhibition in collaboration with Rainbow Unicorn.