JACKY CONNOLLY’S POST-MACHINIMA ERA
The Mineral Kingdom (Dark Green) (2025) is a 37-minute looped video installation within Connolly’s broader Mineral Kingdom cycle. The work is closely related to Scenes from Subnature and the Mineral Kingdom, a six-channel installation shown earlier in 2025 at lower_cavity, an artist-run, invitational residency and project space in Western Massachusetts.
The Green iteration was later presented at the 14th Taipei Biennial, Whispers on the Horizon, curated by Sam Bardaouil and Till Fellrath, at Taipei Fine Arts Museum. There, two screens mount at different heights on a large metal scaffold: LED light runs through the bars, so the support structure glows from within. The viewer stands between a sky image and a subterranean one, held in vertical relation by a physical armature that doubles as atmosphere.
Nothing here points to gameplay capture, a key technique in Connolly’s previous moving-image practice. What the American artist uses instead — generative AI, outdated computer graphics, photographs, visuals drawn from 1990s children’s books and video game imagery — forms a new kind of aesthetics assembled from a variety of technical and cultural sources.
Connolly’s earlier work redefined the very meaning of avant-garde machinima...