Output details

Coal-Fired Computers

<29> Coal Fired Computers was produced for the 25th anniversary of the 1984/85 UK miners' strike with the National Union of Mineworkers(Great Britain). The work employed a fully functioning 17.5 ton coal powered steam engine to power a single computer that displayed the records from two contentious databases, including one from the UK government. The databases were of miners' claims for those who have contracted Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) since 1952 and those miners that have died in mining accidents since 1700. Data was rendered physical by controlling air compressors to inflate two preserved sets of diseased lungs.

The work reveals workings of relational machines created from the ordering of views, permissions structures, normalisation of data, and characteristic formal qualities of a given enterprise. The relational model breaks down and reconstructs information. Art practice methods conjoin with computational processes to offer public health bodies new ways to present complex datasets to the public, leading to an improvement of their families’ health and well being.

The work is innovative in harnessing an anachronistic form of energy generation to power digital technology. It is rigorous in the factual data that it accesses and communicates to the gallery audience. The use of physical computing techniques to transform abstract, yet politically charged data into tangible phenomena in the exhibition space fulfil the potential of technologically enabled creative practice to engage diverse audiences with complex societal issues.

Originally commissioned by the leading international media art festival, AV Festival 2010, and produced in partnership with Discovery Museum, Isis Arts and The Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation (UK Branch of the Portuguese culture and society foundation). It was exhibited at the Discovery Museum Newcastle-Upon-Tyne and went on to be exhibited at leading UK cultural venue Arnofini Bristol and in Europe at Artefact, Leuven Belgium.