Catalogue > At random

'Artifice' stars the only artificial volcano to survive its own eruption: a model replica of Vesuvius from the grounds of a pleasure palace built by an 18th-century German prince. Gardens as models of worldbuilding and empires are the subject of this queer cli-fi that mixes facts with speculation. A media archaeology of how we model earth and atmosphere runs through its images, samples, and sounds—culminating in a dazzling yet foreboding explosion of forms. The film is shot on location in Germany at the Schloss Sanssouci Potsdam, Schloss Solitude Stuttgart, and the Wörlitzer Park Dessau. 'Artifice' is the third episode in the Imaginary Explosions cosmology, which translates aesthetic forms of communication across sensory modalities while being in relation to inhuman alterities and non-normative bodies. How can we understand and interpret the inhuman world? How can we practice other ways of being in a body? Focusing on communication with geologic subjects through technologies and mutual alliances, the cosmology explores how human and mineral subjectivities are entangled, emphasizing moments when the earthly asserts its agency in the political sphere.

Caitlin Berrigan works as a visual artist and writer to explore poetics and queer science fiction as world-making practices through sculptural instruments, moving images, and new technologies. Her extensive speculative cosmology, Imaginary Explosions, blends research science with art and fiction alongside emerging media instruments and new technologies. The episodic series centers geological animacies as transfeminist scientists cooperate with the desires of the mineral earth to simultaneously erupt all volcanoes. The work has been the subject of a book (Broken Dimanche Press, 2018) solo shows at JOAN Los Angeles (2023) and Art in General (2019) reviewed in Artforum, and a world premiere in the Berlinale Forum Expanded Exhibition (2020). Berrigan has presented her work at the Whitney Museum, Henry Art Gallery, Harvard Carpenter Center, Union Docs, Ashkal Alwan, and the European Media Arts Festival among other international venues. Her experimental writings are published by e-flux, Georgia, MARCH, Duke University Press and Broken Dimanche Press. She has received fellowships and residencies from Creative Capital, the Humboldt Foundation, Skowhegan, Graham Foundation, and Akademie Schloss Solitude. She earned a Master’s from MIT’s program for Art, Culture and Technology and a B.A. from Hampshire College.