Necromancer — Andrew Roberts

If magic would be a non-renewable natural resource, what clues would it give us about a supposed immaterial digitality when the geological resources that feed our black boxes are being exploited? If our machines have instrumentalized lightness, mobility and speed as a sign of immateriality, what stories reveal a heavy and material technology acting upon bodies made of flesh and minerals?

In Necromancer, Andrew Roberts revisits the work of Larry Niven —a high fantasy writer informed by his ecological thinking— and the myriad of agents who dialogue with the author's ideas through video games, board games, role-playing games, and collectible cards. Roberts prepares a playground full of connections that move between the historiography of a subculture and conspiracy thinking, thereby manufacturing a genealogy of media that aims to become media geology.

At the center of Roberts and Niven's work is Mana, a video game mechanic popularized by World of Warcraft as a point system for casting spells. In reality, one can trace the appearance of Mana in the Western imagination to a colonial process. As a result of explorations to the Pacific Islands that sought the spread of Christianity through Missions, the word found its place in English academia when Robert Henry Codrington published The Melanesians: Studies in their Anthropology and Folk-Lore in 1891. The word, for the natives, meant a natural force similar to lightning; for academics, mistaken by their Eurocentric bias, it was evidence that a proto-religion connected the Pacific.

Mana reemerged in California during the 1960s through American academia, counterculture movements, psychedelic medievalism, and the foundations of the now computer industry. In response to the Santa Barbara oil spill that devastated the bay of southern California during 1969, Niven published his short story Not Long Before the End, where he established a world in which magic was a resource violently consumed by his magicians. The Magic Goes Away from 1978 expands his literary universe by naming this non-renewable natural resource as Mana. From that point on, computer and role-playing game developers integrated his ideas into the mechanics of their games, inadvertently injecting an environmentalist spin into the now leading interactive fantasy franchises.

Andrew Roberts articulates this playground through objects, digital animations and poems that build obscure and cryptic references among themselves. If Niven catalyzes his concern about the oil crisis and air pollution into fantasy stories, Roberts questions how to continue building on it. Faced with the exploitation of human bodies and mining of rare minerals shipped to the technology industry, how can we play with environmental fantasies to name the digital as something material?

Vanitas (R), 2022. 4K digital animation, color, sound, 30fps. Loop.

Vanitas (G), 2022. 4K digital animation, color, sound, 30fps. Loop.

Vanitas (B), 2022. 4K digital animation, color, sound, 30fps. Loop.

Necromancer, Installation view at House of Chappaz, Barcelona, 2022.

Excalibur Resources Ltd. (The sun was warm and bright, and here they sat on the biggest corpse in the world), 2022. Digital prints on aluminium cutouts. 120 × 210 cm — 47 1⁄4 × 82 1⁄2 in.

Alien Metals Ltd., 2022. Digital prints on aluminium cutouts. 43 × 66 cm — 17 × 26 in.

Silver Viper Minerals, 2022. Digital prints on aluminium cutouts. 440 × 90 cm — 15 3⁄4 × 35 1⁄2 in.

Harvest Gold Corporation, 2022. Digital prints on aluminium cutouts, 40 × 100 cm — 15 3⁄4 × 39 1⁄4 in.

Commander Resources Ltd. (red), 2022. Digital print on aluminium cutout and stainless steel bolts. 45 × 35 cm — 17 ¾ × 13 3⁄4 in.

Commander Resources Ltd. (purple), 2022. Digital print on aluminium cutout and stainless steel bolts. 45 × 35 cm — 17 ¾ × 13 3⁄4 in.

Commander Resources Ltd. (blue), 2022. Digital print on aluminium cutout and stainless steel bolts. 45 × 35 cm — 17 ¾ × 13 3⁄4 in.

Commander Resources Ltd. (green), 2022. Digital print on aluminium cutout and stainless steel bolts. 45 × 35 cm — 17 ¾ × 13 3⁄4 in.

Commander Resources Ltd. (yellow), 2022. Digital print on aluminium cutout and stainless steel bolts. 45 × 35 cm — 17 ¾ × 13 3⁄4 in.

Commander Resources Ltd. (blue, purple, red, yellow and green), Installation view at House of Chappaz, Valencia, 2022.

Necromancer, Installation view at House of Chappaz, Barcelona, 2022.

Necromancer, Installation view at House of Chappaz, Valencia, 2022.