Spaghetti Blockchain
Mika Rottenberg combines in Spaghetti Blockchain seemingly incompatible worlds: insights of CERN experiments, female Tuvan throat singers, and a potato farm in Main. This work is informed by Rottenberg’s interest in new materialisms, an interdisciplinary field of inquiry characterized by a turn away from the dualisms persistent in cultural theory and a reconsideration of the material relationships between human and nonhuman entities.
In the film, the artist does mash-up images of the filming from her time as a Guest Artist at CERN - mainly from the ATLAS experiment, CERN Data Centre, Antimatter Factory and ISOLDE experiment. She combines this footage filmed in the laboratory with colourful ASMR-style scenarios, creating imagery simultaneously pleasurable and troubling.
Spaghetti Blockchain explores absurdist satire while acutely creating allegories for contemporary life: an exploration of labour, technology, distance, and matter about the seemingly immaterial. Through these film locations, Rottenberg experiments with humans' idea as composed of and as manipulators of matter, revealing the interconnectedness between the mechanical and the corporeal.
Single-channel 4K video installation, 7.1 surround sound, color; approx. 21 min © Mika Rottenberg, Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth
Produced by Museum of Contemporary Art Toronto; Arts at CERN, the arts program of the European Laboratory of Particle Physics, Geneva, with the support of the Permanent Mission of the United States to the United Nations, Geneva; Sprengel Museum, Hannover, with the support of Niedersächsische Sparkassenstiftung; and New Museum, New York