Biography

Caitlin Berrigan works across video, sculpture, performance and text to engage with the intimate and embodied dimensions of power, politics and capitalism. Focusing on mineral extraction, rocks, and the more-than-human world, she is interested in tracing material relations. Her work has shown internationally including at the Whitney Museum, Poetry Project, Henry Art Gallery, Harvard Carpenter Center, Berlinale, and UnionDocs. She has had solo shows at JOAN Los Angeles and Art in General (New York). She is the recipient of numerous grants and residencies including from the Humboldt Foundation, Creative Capital, Skowhegan, Graham Foundation, and Akademie Schloss Solitude. Caitlin Berrigan holds a Master’s in Art, Culture and Technology from MIT and is currently completing her PhD-in-Practice at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna.

A voice becomes a mirror plane becomes a holohedral wand (2023)

A voice becomes a mirror plane becomes a holohedral wand is a speculative fiction about the extraction of minerals in the deep sea. Narrated by a not-quite-human character, it tells the story of a deadening ocean, and the adventures of this one being amidst the increased desperation to maintain the structures of life under capitalism. The accompanying soundscape composed by Samuel Hertz immerses the listener in an oceanic underworld that has become the site of deep-sea mining, with recordings from hydrothermal vents and impulse responses from mineral crystallographies. The artwork was originally commissioned by Radio Amnion as an audio transmission to the Pacific Ocean during the full moon with a submerged neutrino telescope.

Written and performed: Caitlin Berrigan
Sound design and mix: Samuel Hertz

Hydrothermal vent tones sampled by T. Crone, et al, “The Sound Generated by Mid-Ocean Ridge Black Smoker Hydrothermal Vents,” Plos One (2006). As well as impulse responses generated from mineral crystallographies modeled by M. Aristov using VESTA: K. Momma and F. Izumi, “VESTA 3 for three-dimensional visualization of crystal, volumetric and morphology data,” J. Appl. Crystallogr., 44, 1272-1276 (2011).