Post hoc, 2019

Post hoc is an inventory of loss in the form of an unfathomably long list, read by an artificial intelligence entity named Amy. The vast list spans an incomprehensible range of subjects and confronts the notion that in the very act of naming, power and ownership are exerted over things in the world by containing them. Post hoc's strange amalgam of types of things momentarily gains form — ghostly reminders of what once was — that is now gone. Fossilised as twenty-four kilometres of printed material and transmitted across a network supported by stealth telecommunication towers, Post hoc is a vast tomb of things that our present moment sits on top of. The temporal act of naming and the momentary summoning might also be considered a tool for conjuring: through a speech-act each entity is called-up to the present moment, from vanished wonders of the world to disappeared sounds; extinct languages to things that melted. Over the course of the work's exhibition nothing is repeated — each utterance occurs once before sinking back into the past. This original creative work reflects on what disappears from our visibility and brings into focus the cost of a constant demand for progress as well as the resulting losses and extinctions whilst confronting the possibility that containment might presuppose the loss it seeks to protect against.