Short Program 3: Congo Forward

'Core Dump: New York' - Watch Here

Director: Francois Knoetze

Experimental, 2019, 12 Min.

Time: October 16th - 31st

About:

Taking Boston Dynamics’ iconic ‘Big Dog’ robot as a starting point, CORE DUMP: NEW YORK, contests the West as a site of freedom and progress. After escaping the lab, Big Dog is severed in two by the doors of a subway train, setting the scene for a parallel journey through New York City. Its journey ends when one half is dumped back in Dakar among a shipment of electronic waste, bringing the series full-circle as the two sides face each other from opposite shores of the Atlantic.

A “core dump” is the recorded state of the working memory of a computer at a specific moment in time. If a crash occurs, the computer is able to recall this ‘imprint’ of its previous state as a means to debug and recover. This oddly poetic ‘memory’ of a computer forms the basis for Francois Knoetze’s CORE DUMP, a four-part sculptural and video series filmed in Dakar, Kinshasa, Shenzhen and New York that extends the metaphor of a crash to the impending breakdown and unsustainability of the global capitalist techno-scientific system.