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Simon Denny
Mine
Emma-Kate Wilson
The new exhibition at Mona – Museum of Old and New Art is consistent with the ‘raison d’être’
of the dungeon-like space; that is, to leave pre-conceived ideas at the ticket desk. Leave your coat,
bag, and judgements. This is a museum of doubt.My experience of ‘Mine’ by Berlin-based, New Zealand-born artist, Simon Denny, conceptualised
itself while I was in the gallery bathroom. With the ‘O’ device, and my bag on the side, I sat down
to watch a film being projected on the ground from a little hole in the ceiling. I became acutely
aware that the technology I had been using moments before to examine data and data collecting
might be listening in on this moment.The ‘O’ is an iPod that uses your location in the museum to tell you about the artworks around
you. It’s also been collecting your entire experience, what you like, how long you’ve been there,
and where you’ve been in the gallery since it opened in 2011. Denny and the curators of ‘Mine’,
Emma Pike and Jarrod Rawlins, have put this consideration of data into the exhibition – while
highlighting the world’s use of technology and the effects this has on the environment and labour.
Data is a physical thing.As such, we navigate an augmented reality to look at this data in the exhibition. Each art
installation comes with its own data reader that makes your experience unique (and an asset).
Therefore ‘Mine’ becomes a micro-experience of the real world, even when you don’t consciously
enter data, every building you walk into, every purchase is being tracked. But I wouldn’t worry too
much about this. As Pike and Denny explained, the museum has more data than it knows what to
do with.Another fun part of the exhibition, along with AR, and a gallery-room-sized board game, is when
you take a selfie with the ‘O’ device. The ‘Mine’ app then tells you your emotion. I got ‘angry’ with
my big grin. I’m sure this isn’t correct. Denny explained, ‘diagnosis is happening a lot, and more
and more and automated systems that are actually based on old science is often taken from the
1940s and 50s, where they believed there were only seven emotional states that you can possibly
be. And as you can see, they often get them wrong.’Each element of the data and technology-heavy exhibition draws your attention back to the
philosophical problems that come from our reliance on these fields. But, interestingly, the
aesthetics seem to enhance and reject the digital.The exhibition consists of a giant board game, with cardboard cutouts of mining equipment,
based on the 1960s Australian board game ‘Squatter’; a simulation of a rare Tasmanian bird, King
Island Brown Thornbill inside a human-sized Amazon worker cage; a visual de-packing of the
digital elements of an Amazon Echo. In the final room, are a collection of artworks that explore
‘self’ and the body from artists like Tony Albert, Julie Rrap and Ronnie van Hout.The audience are invited to consider data, mining, and your involvement in these processes. The
critical takeaway is that we are all complicit. But, also, while it may be easier to be cynical, we are
dependent and in cases, should be grateful for our obsession with data and technology. With the