H.D. Reliquary is the first eponymous full length and installation from Ben Shirken. The record was released alongside a multimedia installation in collaboration with Studio ZM, Muein, Duncan Davies at Intercomm, a space for liberation music performance and media. H.D.R. featured performances by Madeline Stepien, Dorothy Carlos, Matt Bent & Kevin Eichenberger, Drumloop, & JP.
The title references the hard drive as a sacred container for relics, contemplating how digitally archived fragments of one’s existence can burn eternally after death. The exhibition’s visual language is the natural extension of the CT and MRI scanner’s affordances. Slices of objects are algorithmically recombined to create 3D volumes that rotate freely in space. Other sequences of slices create 2D planes that traverse the object across space and time. The data itself is curated as archival fragments, bits, and shrapnel–sourced from obscure datasets and open source repositories–to show the viewer the intricate inner composition of artifacts as varied as cactus fruit to the lumbar to the common battery. Audio is spatialized on an 8-channel speaker array, playing through the entire 11 tracks of the LP.
The sound of H.D.R. runs off of a dissected, acrylic encased PC towards the back of the exhibition. By loading image data in real time into the custom viewer software alongside audio, H.D.R. presents a direct, almost unmediated, encounter with the data itself. The proprietary software viewer, as reliquary, elevates the remnants of medical imaging and scientific protocols to a medium for meditation and spiritual encounter, harmonizing with the sweeping soundscapes of H.D. Reliquary.
H.D. Reliquary brings the ancient act of enshrining holy bodies into the present using practices of sociotechnical intervention: the technical object itself becomes the architecture of a sanctuary. The Reliquary stands as a fixture of transcendental time. A secular-sacred vessel–not of holy blood–but of archival shrapnel and the traces of information. In a historical moment hallmarked by democratic dissolution and decaying institutions, we seek containers for contemplation. Not for dogma, but for meditation: a media of revelation.
Informatic illustrations peel back time. A cybernetic temple endeavors to braid bit with photon–our fastest systems available–to create a rupture in billions of years of deep time. How? Computerized and X-ray Tomography scans of organic artifacts ranging from human bodies to quantum particles, fossils to batteries. Noospheric representational structures appear through Gaian realism–patterns of interdependence–in deep meditation. This becomes a visceral layer for an integrated, sympoetic awakening.
