KAJE. Brooklyn, NY
1.10.26 - 1.25.26
The acceleration of industrial “intelligence” is leaving an immaterial debris field in its wake. In digital form, we call it “slop,” but its material detritus is (mostly) nameless. It’s felt in the bodies that live in the shadow of data centers. The constant hum of the server racks accumulate in the ears of neighbors. The machines are always on: buzzing and grinding at 70Db, 24/7.
Cache Machine was mounted as a short-run residency in KAJE’s ground level gallery, taking shape as a sound installation with interstitial performance programming on the exhibition's central 62-channel wavefield synthesis speaker array. The residency leaned into the project’s capacities as an experiential interface for investigating the onslaught of transient digital material amassing in contemporary life.
Cache Machine is a generative performance by the debris of artificial “intelligence”. It brings the sonic wasteland of machinic materialism to KAJE as a somatic activation. The installation consists of an assemblage of curated components that {generate, delete, overwrite, denoise, renoise, block, amplify, spatialize} – a set of computational moves choreographed into a generative soundscape.
Over the course of the installation, a program cycles through the sounds of writing while erasing its own memory. A recorder captures the internal processes of a GPU rendering incomplete images. The work is a sensory scaffold. That is, an artistic intervention that takes latent forces beyond the human perceptual domain and renders them visceral, somatic, and residual. It is a direct encounter with the “sonic detritus” of the factory floor.
The Cache Machine is metabolic. A “cache” is an ephemeral waypoint where local memory is stashed for temporary usage and fast access. Data is written and evicted rapidly. The installation probes at the flood of neural media which is largely digital waste as soon as it is conceived. Its natural environment is the cache, to be cyclically written and rewritten under the banner of “progress.”
Describing a humanity that “proves itself by destruction”, Walter Benjamin observed that narratives of “progress” often obscure the “piling wreckage” it generates”. Cache Machine replicates the wreckage’s radiant hum. In doing so, it provides access to experiencing the (often restricted) territories of the “thinking” machines, hurling sonic psyops, dissonance, and spiking electrical strain in its wake.
– Ben Shirken & Johan Michalove
"A Klee painting named ‘Angelus Novus’ shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet."
– Walter Benjamin, 1940s
Art and Sound: Ben Shirken
Technical Direction: Johan Michalove
Additional Video: Will Freudenheim
Installation: Duncan Davies
Lighting: Gum Gum Studio
3D Printing: Tee Topor
Addl. Installation: John Bemis
Addl. Installation: Tanner Poff
Performances
1.26.26
C. Lavender
Lydo
1.24.26
Daniel Neumann
Testu
