Myles Painter / Morwenna Kearsley Sunrise with Sea Monsters / Cives Grati!

A screening of new work that meditates upon museum collections, long-term knowledge preservation, post-humanism and the fallibility of memory. Painter's new film "Sunrise with Sea Monsters "is a meditation on the new methods and technologies being developed to store and preserve human knowledge and speculation upon its subsequent recipients. Shot entirely on 16mm, the film combines documentary with travelogue, intimately investigating its subject through interviews with scientists, philosophers, innovators and interrogators. The preservation of human knowledge is explored through doomsday technologists such as Norwegian company Piql who have developed a way to store digital information on celluloid film in an arctic vault - and biotechnologist Dr Yaniv Erlic who has developed a biological hard drive that can store all the worlds data - also Dr Peter Kazansky who’s data crystal was fired into space to orbit the sun for eternity. Interrogating the conceit of these technologies, philosophers Timothy Morton and David Roden distill the value and recipients of our future knowledge through a kaleidoscope of metaphysical and posthuman thought.

Kearsley’s new digital film "Cives Grati!" made during a year-long residency at Perth Museum & Galleries considers the labyrinthine spaces of the museum’s archive as a site to consider authenticity in relation to autobiographical narrative, photography and memory. Foregrounding this is the historical context of David Morrison’s architectural design and the enduring legacy of TH Marshall on the “grateful citizens” of Perth.