Digital Geology

Jayson Haebich is a London based artist and researcher who is interested in the intersection of art, technology and science. He investigates how substances, materials and processes move between different layers of the physical, digital and ontological world. His work challenges the assumptions about how matter and physical processes interact with the world around us. Through the use of substances such as lasers, light, crystals, slime and various quantum phenomena he investigates the links between the physical process that have continued since deep time and the modern processes of software and computation which rule our lives today. His work has been presented globally including at the Salisbury Cathedral, Bauhaus, Somerset House, British Film Institute and in smaller galleries and institutions across Europe, Australia and China.

This work seeks to explore the materiality of the internet and digital technology by applying the approach of digital design and fabrication to the creation of a raw mineral or rock. This process allows people to design a rock that exhibits mineral properties within the digital strata of a web browser on a digital computer. This rock exists within the cloud of modern day web browser technology which despite being distributed across many different devices and geographic locations all are comprised of the fundamental minerals formed by rocks mined from the physical earth. This shows what is usually an exceptionally long process of geological deep time and replicates it in in the hypersonic rate of digital computation. The result of this is the merging of the virtual and real into some kind of hyper reality and brings awareness to the minerals and raw materials used to construct the device you are using to view this webpage.