“Mullaloo and Magnus” by Oliver Hull
Title:
- Mullaloo and Magnus
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Artist Statement:
Mullaloo and Magnus is an exhibition about an interconnected system composed of an aquifer — Mullaloo — and a supercomputer Magnus.
For millions of years, the Mullaloo aquifer was plantless and occupied only by stygofauna and troglofauna. These organisms are highly endemic, and due to their remoteness many of them have never been seen. We are only just beginning to be able to sense them through Environmental DNA (eDNA) sampling technology, a technique which has only recently been made available by supercomputing. Magnus, the fastest supercomputer in the southern hemisphere, sits above the Mullaloo aquifer. As Dr Mathew Campbell and Dr Mattia Saccò process the eDNA in the water of the Mullaloo using Magnus, the waters of the aquifer flow through Magnus itself, cooling its processors, to be expelled back into the aquifer.
The relationship between these systems contains various incongruencies and poetic loops which speak to and amplify the qualities of the systems individually, but together join to make something new that can’t be easily broken down — a third system that is both old and new, alive and dead, interior and exterior, virtual and physical. The project Mullaloo and Magnus approaches this third system as integrated, interlocked, attempting to reflect and complicate these complex relationships.
Mullaloo and Magnus presents a sculpture, generative sound work and a realtime eDNA simulation made through collaboration with Dr Mattia Saccò and Dr Matthew Campbell.
This project has been made with support from the Subterranean and Groundwater Ecology (SuRGE) Group at Curtin University, Pawsey Supercomputing Center Visualisation Lab
and CSIRO.
