ENERGY⋮PANGEA: Legacy Archive

When I started ENERGY⋮PANGEA in late 2010, the idea was simple — build a new system of relational activity between objects, the environment, and an emerging consciousness in the collective human psyche, a system that aims to move away from the dark, often apocalyptic renditions of planetary crisis and late capitalism that was prevalent in my earlier projects like POST.CONSUMER.CULT, PHILIPS 2013, and Old Earth Objects.

I then came across the list of 17 Rare Earth elements. Beginning with Neodymium in 2011, I would go on to develop a "sculpture," or more accurately, a Sculptural System for each of the elements. These systems would speculatively explore recourse extraction (both on and off world), supply chains, technological dependancy, geopolitical tensions, altered states of consciousness, UFOs (tentatively), and how New Age mysticism entangles with consumer capitalism.

Fresh out of art school, I'd come from a background at the intersection of ephemeral real-world object based arrangements (see Iconoplasm and Live-Trap) that were documented and shared on sites like Flickr, and engaged with Tumblr scenes like Kari Altmann's R-U-IN?S Network. I'd also been tutored by Shelley Sacks, who runs the SSRU (Social Sculpture Research Unit) out of Oxford Brookes. This intersection, informed by my earlier interest in Walter Benjamin's Arcades project, and then later influenced by the emerging network cultures of early post-internet, laid the ground work for The Rare Earth Sculpture Project, which was operating within the ENERGY⋮PANGEA incubation chamber.

For this project, I wanted to make "real" sculpture, and so I enrolled on the MFA program at the Slade School under that discipline. At this time, through my involvement in R-U-IN?S, shows like "Avatar4D" (by Just chillin), Brad Troemel's "An Immaterial Survey of Our Peers," and Ben Vicker's "New Age Default" at New Gallery London, I was receiving quite a bit of interest around my work, and this enabled me to get the projects funded and exhibited at various exhibition spaces.

The Rare Earth Sculptures acted like nodes in a wider system. I used Timothy Morton's concept of the "Hyperobject" and Bruno Latour's "Actor Network Theory" to explain this. At the time, the practice was wrapped up in the "New Materialism" trend and "Object Orientated Ontology" discourse that was also being explored by artists like Katja Novitskova and Timur Si-qin. However, I never really liked Morton or Latour's writing all that much, and in private I'd began taking an interest in the Traditionalist philosophy of René Guénon and Julius Evola. I was aware that this would be seen as controversial, likely a problem in the art world, and at the same time trying to reconcile the challenging aspects of my earlier works and the ideas that I wanted to further develop.

It is worth noting that the Rare Earth series was also very much informed and inspired by AIDS-3D's early works, as I was particularly interested in how they were using object and sculpture as kind of prop, trojan, or decoy to enable a wider narrative or system of relations to develop beyond the object itself, which became like a superficial ornament, asset, or signifier of value that is "charged up" or "energised" with deeper meaning through its embedded set of relations; from the artists intent, to a wider set of interactions and interactivities.

Before Covid hit, I was already struggling with continuing to make this series. The culture wars had set in, cancel culture was ripe, Trump had "got in," and I was seeing how insane the left were becoming. I had to either hide or admit that I preferred Trump to the "other side," and this began to alienate me, contributed to relationships not working out, and art-world connections faltering. So, I started to make Pathology Loop in response, smoke weed, and hang out and collaborate with my friend Bora Akinciturk. This was before The Xegis Codex, and it officially marks the end of ENERGY⋮PANGEA.

Now, in 2025, I am "moving on-chain," and as cliché as that is, there are 99 reasons why this makes sense. For a start, coming out of post-internet scenes—although many from that movement moved into physical gallery and institutional work, rooted in real-world objects, sculpture, and installation—I actually always struggled with this, and with physical exhibitions; and therefor my exit from the formal Art world is not solely down to incompatible politics, philosophy, and fringe interests.

Whenever I was making physical work, I was always thinking about how it would look and be contextualised online, because I knew that the show itself would come down, the work would go into storage, and the documentation would then become the more real, tangible, and lasting artefact.

If you make physical works, particularly large scale works that are difficult to store or preserve, then you are reliant on funding, galleries, institutions, or collectors to account for it, and I never had enough support from any of these, or felt like I had agency or control in those domains. When you work with galleries—and I worked with the notorious Future Gallery—there are no smart contracts, and you can lose control over your art. Thus, some of the Rare Earth Sculptures had to be dismantled and are now destroyed, because me and my family could no longer manage the storing of them. I essentially let Future Gallery "have" some of the others, because letting them go was an easier solution than storing them myself. To this day, I don't know what they did with them, and I never saw any money. In the end I felt it was easier to just let it go, and move on. And move on I did.

Thus, I am dematerialising and digitising everything, my whole oeuvre. Much of it is already digital anyway, but for the works that crossed between digital and physical realms, they present more of a challenge. What is left of ENERGY⋮PANGEA, at least that which is under my control and jurisdiction, is digital. If this work isn't secured as blockchain assets, then it will be lost; when subscription services and cloud storage can no longer be payed for, or disappear, when hard drives fail, and when web-hosting goes down. By migrating everything on-chain, my work's future is secured as art, artefact, system, network, sculpture, literature, etc. Under smart contracts that I deploy, where royalties are set, and where collectors own works that have directly come from my own hand, code, and intention — authenticated at the level of the protocol itself.

Art is no longer contingent on institutions, corporations, or fragile infrastructures, but can exist in perpetuity within a distributed and decentralised architecture. In this sense, the blockchain becomes not just a ledger but a museum, a library, a studio, a performance space, and of course, an asset class; a living ecology in which ENERGY⋮PANGEA continues to evolve, interlink, and generate new meanings long after the material substrates have decayed.

Media assets, editions, and 1-of-1s will be deployed under the following custom contract via Manifold, here:

0x9663df3b9541f882a43dd160396def7846c23749