Structured in two parts, the multimedia installation «mangan gardens» artistically investigates long-term deep-sea mining research and explorations that have sought to extract resources from the bottom of the Pacific – to then imagine non-human resistance and intelligence.

A manganese nodule grows over millions of years at the bottom of the sea, for example around fossil shark teeth which sank to depths of 3,000-5,000 meters in the Pacific ocean. These nodules contain precious metals such as cobalt, copper, zinc, manganese and nickel as well as rare earth oxides. These raw materials we now call resources, are in high demand for ‹green› or ‹intelligent› technologies and functionalized in Janis Polar’s electronic devices his artworks depends on.

In PART I, I arranged nine authentic manganese nodules from 1970s deep-sea mining explorations between two parabolic mirrors from a used 1970s toy, creating an optical illusion resembling a hologram – something between an object of desire and media device free of energy transmissions. In the background, an endless loop of a historic mining experiment plays, depicting nodules being sucked in by a collector with the shape of a giant vacuum-cleaner-like monster.

PART II is a single-channel experimental documentary in which I combine scientific and pop-cultural archives: Images based on deep-sea expeditions from the 1970s until today (GEOMAR – Helmholtz Center for Ocean Research & BGR – Federal Institute of Geosciences and Natural Resources) are narratively structured by voice and sound samples from 1989 movies. That specific year not only marks a significant turn toward ecological concerns of deep-sea mining, but also the release date of several Hollywood movies set in the deep-sea, addressing mining activities, anthropomorphic creatures and catastrophe. «mangan gardens» explores how today’s absence of images from actual mining tests can be imagined through the metaphor of an intelligent, ambiguous monster.