Converging realities, CHIP joins a white stone column to a small digital I-form released in extended reality (XR). The minimalist plinth is at once sculptural object and support: an interlocutor, instrument, and agent of meaning. Carved from storied Carrara marble, the column is crowned by a gold barcode, a gilded portal that is scanned to release an I-form visible in 3D through the viewer's mobile phone and the artist’s bespoke app. Seated on the column, the figure appears as digital letter and primordial totem, recasting the classical pedestal-bust for the computational era.

The virtual 'chip' is carved from the codified ancient heartwood of a giant tree from a buried forest in Aotearoa New Zealand, carbon-dated to more than 45,000 years. At once universal and intimate, it holds a fragment of time and existence in 3D pixels. Forged through artificial intelligence (AI), this micro-chip operates as interface and artifact, once hidden in the earth and now returned as a digital echo, extending evolutionary memory into the datasphere. Across ancestral and technological registers, CHIP moves between physical absence and perceptual presence, a threshold for sensory intrigue where the unseen stirs agency into being.

Presented:
Gill Gatfield, Habeas Corpus 2025
NARS Foundation
International Artist Residency Exhibition Season III
Brooklyn, New York
August–Sept. 2025