Epicentres [The Tetley]

Epicentres is a series of computer-generated images that indicate the position of earthquakes in remote locations, in this case, Alaska in winter. Tremors that are low on the Richter scale might only be sensed by seismological recording equipment rather than be felt by humans. Twenty-four of these images were collected in a softback publication, produced as part of 'The Editions', by Guerilla Writers, edited by Sharon Kivland.

The research is part of a wider inquiry into the devolution of the experience of noticing external phenomena to digital sensing equipment. Here, technology pays attention to this visceral geological event so we don’t have to; data is silently gathered, quantified, and visualised, and everyday life remains uninterrupted by these events. It might be said that the sensing apparatus constructs the real through an automated mediation of it, by determining what constitutes a seismological ‘event to be noticed’. The utilitarian aesthetic qualities of these images, whose diagrammatic form reveals almost nothing about the physically unsettling affective experience they refer to, further distances the event from the realm of the subjective. Collecting the images in a book could be seen as an attempt to reclaim some humanness, or relatable materiality, from this automated sensing system, while the form of the book also invites the type of focused human attention that is often claimed to be eroded by digital technologies.