The Ninth Bridgewater Treatise, which he wrote while designing his computational engines. In it, Babbage fantasised about machines that could execute total recollection, and conceived of the atmosphere as "one vast library on whose pages are forever written all that man has ever said or woman whispered". Poetic stuff.
"There is a chapter in this treatise, where Babbage basically talks about the moment when we speak, we create a turbulence in the air, and he wonders what would happen if we had a computer that was so sophisticated that we could rewind the motion of all particles and recreate voices from the past," says Lozano-Hemmer.
Elsewhere in the exhibition is a work titled Field Atmosphonia, which unfolds in a dark cavernous space under a canopy of 3,000 loudspeakers, each fitted with a little light. "The whole project starts with this 19th-century idea of being able to hear anybody from the past. But then the question [becomes], 'Do we want that? What are the implications of the atmosphere remembering everything?'"New York Times review"I thought that was accurate because I think about death a lot, not just because I'm Mexican but in general, when we're making art, we're thinking about the fact that we're only here for a little time.
It's an attempt to capture breath as Babbage had imagined, but also "an absurd and slightly perverse attempt to capture the essence of a person," says Lozano-Hemmer. "This is an object that is very pregnant with the history of the devastation of the Australian atmosphere, in dialogue with Yhonnie Scarce's work," says Lozano-Hemmer.