Relics of a Future Dark (2021 - )

Agnomancer

In digital environments belief is shaped by an abundance of fragmented and decontextualised information. The rise of 'fake news'; conspiracy theories; and mainstream acceptance of ideas which might once have been fringe, all bare witness to the human attempt at piecing together a narrative about the world from these disparate sources. In this context, when information is not always reliable and there is often no sure way to verify it, rational deduction begins to appear more and more like (educated) guesswork.

AgnoMancy takes its name from the greek formation: ἀ- (a-, “not”) + γιγνώσκω (gignṓskō, “I know”) + μᾰντείᾱ (manteíā, “divination”), or, 'the divination of not knowing'. It draws on the ancient practises of osteomany and lithomancy - forms of divination which have both been used for thousands of years throughout a variety of cultures as to create meaning in a chaotic and unknowable world. In these practises, bones or stones are cast, with the pattern they fall in guided by the spirit world and interpreted by the caster.

This work uses the pattern that the cast objects form to divine from the digital realm, with the location of the cast objects used to generate a timestamp and return a tweet from Twitter at that time, which bears the ‘breakingnews’ hashtag.