Mercury / from our oceans they took their cloud

Mercury thinks about the ongoingness of colonialism in the age of AI, about bodies and capacities under conscription and capture, with a nod to the anthropological observations of Southeast Asia among the origins of cybernetics. Inspired by invisibilized Filipino service labor, and by queer and diasporic labors of transformation, Mercury presents a mercurial body that becomes a substrate, a platform for shifting codes of use, uncannily animated by unseen forces. Undeniably live, yet, to a modern/colonial viewer, not quite human, this figure plies the continuities between NPCs, the robot, the animal, and the colonized. Through the body's transformations, sociality erupts into the nowhere, non-space of the virtual, making sensible worlds that are the lifeblood of the machine.