Stephen Cornford

Reading:

Holly Jean Buck – After Geoengineering

Suzanne Kriemann – Ge(Essenwiese) K(aningsberg)

Listening to:

Benedict Drew – Lockdown Mixtapes

A lot of Traditional Japanese Music, none of which I can find links to, but this Goze performer – Kikue Sugimoto – captures the mood.

Watching:

The Holt Smithson foundation’s weekly upload, particularly Holt’s Sun Tunnels.

Peter Mettler – The End of Time

Working on:

I am currently working on a residency with a group of volcanologists from Bristol University’s School of Earth Sciences, which now looks like it will be extended into 2021. Broadly speaking this work looks at the relationship between geological materials and the technical instruments that are refined from them and then used to study them. I am looking at parallels between volcanic processes and the manufacturing processes that go into the creation of contemporary media devices, particularly through the lens of silicon. The scientists on the project are studying the behaviour of two silicates (pyroxene and plagioclase) in their high temperature / high pressure experiments, imaging them with X-rays in a silicon image sensor and then modelling their behaviour computationally – again in silicon. My response so far is through video and some high temperature experiments on smartphones. 


Stephen Cornford is a media artist who works with consumer electronics, critiquing the ideologies they embody and the constitutive role they have come to play in our lives. He recently completed a PhD affiliated to the Archaeologies of Media & Technology Research Group at Winchester School of Art.

His current research is concerned with the toxicity of media technologies, and the scarcity of some of the raw materials now ubiquitous in digital imaging devices. These works seek to problematise the technological solutionism often proposed to resolve the environmental impacts of rampant media consumption.

Stephen Cornford