Lito Kattou

Red Lake, 2017

HD real time video projection, HD sound, stills from video

*realised in collaboration and during the 89plus Google Residency in Paris 2017

Developed over the course of the artist’s residency at the Google Cultural Institute in Paris, San, is a basic AI. They operate as an artificially intelligent "agent" written as a deterministic behavioral game-engine character, created to embody an ecological subjectivity alien to human thoughts. They are structured to interact with the climatic changes of Kokkinopezoula copper mine in Cyprus, revealing endlessly the tension between antiquity, colonial history, ecology and time. The real-time data of the work is collected around and from the 'Red Lake', a mine site located near Nicosia, Cyprus, one of the fastest climatic changing regions of the South East Mediterranean zone. The lake is a remnant of the ancient copper mine of Kokkinopezoula in Mitsero, active from the Chalcolithic period until the 1960s. The high acidic environment of the lake does not allow any biological living organism to develop, leaving the surrounding area impervious.

San, as an ungendered artificial agent conceived with human, divine, and animal traits lives in the Red Lake - recreated by Kattou as a real-time digital environment. Their body and actions respond to specific climatic variations such as temperature, humidity, visibility, wind speed and weather. San’s brain is built to guard and react to the Red Lake, they are imagined as a mythological figure protecting their unique surroundings through out their endless continuous activity.