Emma Finn



My work explores mistakes, as well as the black holes in technological history. I envision the history not as a map, or even a grand narrative but as ideas cut short. Forgotten strands of time ready and waiting to be picked up and made into string figures. Using moving image, drawing and other narrative devices, I aim to transport viewers to uncomfortable places that sit between reality and invention in order to create “theoretical fictions” that explore theoretical issues such as communication, technology and non human interconnection. I pull from absurd historical anecdotes, serving them up as antidotes to our present-day malaise. I want to challenge the way we understand communication media history, moving it away from an empirical and teleological framework, and enable discourse that is based on temporality non-linear practice. My approach is to foster a ‘transrational' shift in my practice, in that ‘transrational' approaches do not engage with the question of how to sensibly fit an experience into a rational framework, instead allowing the experience to remain as it was experienced or witnessed. Often this approach links artists, experts, scientists and philosophers to work together to bring to light things that exist but are not understood.