☟Reawakening (Chen Tin Recruitment)☟
Video on monitor, mirror turntable, cassiterite from Jiangxi Province, China, 12:21 mins, 2019
Welcome to a future where minerals carry memories over Millennia. Sometimes, at the moment they are inserted into smartphones, these minerals will decide to reveal their stories. In Myanmar, the leading global supplier of tin for the smartphone industry, a revelation has been unearthed at one of the Chen Tin factories. At the site of the ancient habitat of Barbaturex Morrisoni (a giant lizard that went extinct 40 million years ago), a piece of tin ore has revealed an unlikely intertemporal and interspecies relationship between the lizard and Jim Morrison, lead singer of The Doors. The pair are not tied together simply by nomenclature, but due to a case of unprecedented atavism, are in fact entwined in a cycle of reincarnation. Oh dear.
Directed and edited by Georgie Brinkman.
Assistant direction by Alex Wight.
Original score composed by Jadu Heart.
Filmed by Georgie Brinkman at Wollumbin National Park, Australia, National History Museum, London, and in artist’s home.
Translation by Bonnie Chan.
Chen Tin representative played by Bonnie Chan.
Speculative illustration of Barbaturex Morrisoni by Angie Fox, Nebraska State Museum of Natural History.
Diagram of fossil specimens of Barbaturex Morrisoni - Figure 1. (Jason J. Head Gregg F. Gunnell Patricia A. Holroyd J. Howard Hutchison Russell L. Ciochon Giant lizards occupied herbivorous mammalian ecospace during the Paleogene greenhouse in Southeast Asia. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.)
Links to found video footage - mining animations by ImageMaker Advertising Inc., Hatching of Tuatura Cannibals, BBC Earth, 'HWY: An American Pastoral' by Jim Morrison, footage inside a Chinese phone factory.
Links to 3D models - Psittacosaurus vertebrae.
This work was a collaboration with alt-pop duo Jadu Heart. It was produced as a series of weekly online releases during a 6-week residency at Digital Artist Residency (curated by Tom Milnes). It was then exhibited as part of the associated exhibition ‘Remember Me’ at Magdalen Art Space, Oxford. An archive of the web-based presentation of the work can be accessed here.