“SIMON DENNY: MINE”

Curated by Jarrod Rawlins and Emma Pike

For his solo exhibition “Mine,” Simon Denny will link two forms of extraction that shape our era of “surveillance capitalism”: the environmentally devastating removal of raw materials and rare-earth elements to meet the demands of technology, and the pervasive harvesting of our personal data to fatten the coffers of tech giants like Google and Facebook. Drawing on the work of scholars Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler, Denny will build full-scale replicas of artificially intelligent mining machines; adapt an insidious Amazon patent for a warehouse worker’s cage into a home for the augmented-reality likeness of an endangered Australian bird; and transform Australia’s classic property-acquisition board game Squatter into a life-size metaphor for global data capture and world domination. The show is peak Denny, but it also suggests we may have hit peak extraction—the moment when the ground on which our economic models are built is ready to crumble.