Art installation featuring choreographed and generative elements, incorporating video, sculpture, sound, and robotics.
The exhibition took place from 25 October – 4 December 2024 at Chemist Gallery in London.
The Pits is a new installation by artist Daniel Shanken that descends through tiers and levels: the pit in your stomach, in the ground, and in your brain. It uses eating as a crux, imagining the digestion, assimilation, offloading, and onboarding that occur when giving yourself to be devoured by technologies or entities with their own agency and agendas.
The work shifts between different perspectives—human, non-human, pizza box, and microwave—exploring the pleasure and horror of willingly opting in and zoning out.At the center of the installation is a conversation pit constructed in the gallery, allowing you to physically enter the work. Video projections, created using bespoke software, extend the room with predictive zooms and pans through artificial latent space. The work moves through bodies and places, navigating the relentless extraction of thought and resources, the replacement of cognition with corporate agents.