top of page
Maggie Roberts
Maggie-Roberts-The-Other-Side-of-the-Octopus-2018-digital-collage.jpeg
​© Maggie Roberts, THE OTHER SIDE OF THE DIGITAL IS THE OCTOPUS (2018), closeup 
“Our categories and boundaries are now under immense pressure, cracking and leaking. These sensory webs and amalgamations are an attempt to express a fluid and complex uncertainty populated by entities on a continuum between the human and the non-human, a mix of the organic, the engineered and the synthetic.” - Maggie Roberts
“Our categories and boundaries are now under immense pressure, cracking and leaking.”
– Maggie Roberts

post-anthropocene narrative

interspecies becomings

cosmic and geological time scales

possible futures of being human

immersion

transformations of matter

resistance to the Enlightenment and Neo Liberal worldview

​

virtual worlds and avatars

the virtual bleeds into a post-apocalyptic everyday

digital aesthetics

tactile and fluid materiality

multidimensional world

ML and expanded consciousness

​

Artist website → http://merliquify.com/cv.php

 

“Maggie Roberts is an artist who works across a variety of mediums including monotype prints, collage, animation, video, sound and text. Her work is influenced by evolutionary fever dreams, science fictions, interspecies becomings, octopus camouflage language, digital aesthetics, weird physics and turbulent oceans. It articulates future possible scenarios impacting on the geopolitical present, and manifests invisible currents and currencies. Exploring cosmic and geological time scales, Machine Vision and expanded consciousness – all of which, increasingly, she explores through imagining future possible forms of communication and knowledge gathering with synthetic / artificial intelligence – and how this might impact on what it is to be human. (…) She is known for immersive works, conjuring a tactile and fluid materiality, with both two and three-dimensional works configuring at different depths and perspectives to create a sort of multidimensional world.” (IMT).

​

Maggie mixes digitally generated imagery and 3D animation with photographs and filmed footage. Sheens and fluorescent pigments contribute to the otherworldly presence of the monotype print series.

Between 2016 and 2018 she was a Research Fellow with Goldsmiths College Visual Cultures, where she gave annual public talks, Everting the Virtual, Rituals in Liquidity and The Shaping of a Message symposium (which was part of her solo show Glimmer Breach with IMT Gallery).

Lauren Velnick on “This is tomorrow”

“If we are to think about embodiment and technology, their limits, and where the two meet, it is important to create space for an individual experience, as well as communicating a vision of the collective.”

Two very different exhibitions in 2018 explore Maggie’s ongoing interest in virtual worlds, where invisible beings and pagan avatars channel transformations of matter and different kinds of imaginary as forms of resistance to the Enlightenment and Neo Liberal worldviews. Over a year in the making, her video piece, Miasma for Chrominance, Alembic II with Bones Tan Jones at Res, is the first of these. Working extensively with a Lidar Scan animator and experimental soundscape artists in Cape Town and Google Deep Dream and Datamosh experts in Toronto, she transformed the hinterland canals of the Cape Flats into a sci-fi portal where the virtual bleeds into a post-apocalyptic everyday. (IMT)

​© Maggie Roberts, THE OTHER SIDE OF THE DIGITAL IS THE OCTOPUS (2018
Photographic and video collage, C-Type print, 91.5 x 64 cm

Collabloration “0rphan Drift”

0rphan Drift has explored the boundaries of machine and human vision, since its inception in London in 1994. The collective as avatar has taken diverse forms through the course of its career, sometimes changing personnel and artistic strategies in accordance with the changing exigencies of the time.

In its latest manifestation, 0rphan Drift considers Artificial Intelligence through the somatic tendencies of the octopus – as a distributed, many-minded consciousness.  Inspired by embodied cognitive science and radical anthropology, their multiple channel installations suggest possibilities in expanding and inhabiting other systems of perception and proprioception. They combine video, animation and text with newer tools such as LIDAR scanning to suggest new spatio-temporal formations and ask what kind of bodies might be possible with these new coordinates. Currently they are working toward deepening their engagement into the field, involving direct encounters with cephalopods and collaborative explorations with Machine Learning engineers, VR designers and teuthologists.

Mer/Maggie Roberts/ 0rphan Drift: "Rituals in Liquidity"

References

 

Department of Visual Cultures, Goldsmiths (2018) Mer/Maggie Roberts/ 0rphan Drift: "Rituals in Liquidity". Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4GFrDCYW8G8&t=2657s (Accessed: 01.11.22)

​

IMT Gallery (n.a.) Maggie Roberts. Available at: https://imagemusictext.com/maggie-roberts/ (Accessed: 01.11.22)

bottom of page