Telemetric Feeling in Tita Salina and Irwan Ahmett’s The Ring of Fire (2014–Present)

This essay traces recent and ongoing works and projects of the artist duo Tita Salina and Irwan Ahmett, alongside the etymological history of the science of telemetry. Focusing on three works ( Ziarah Utara , 2018–present; Iron Placenta , 2021; and The Call of Fragility , 2022), in this essay I contend that the duo’s The Ring of Fire (2014–present) meta-project marks the “telemetric turn” in their practice, wherein the use of open-source satellite data and augmented embodiment have become increasingly frequent methods and motifs in their work. Analysing this turn in Salina and Ahmett’s practice in relation to Matthew Fuller and Eyal Weizman’s notion of “investigative aesthetics” and McKenzie Wark’s three-part framework of technics, ethnography, and aesthetics, the essay discusses how documentary and performance, storytelling and investigation, remote sensing and lived realities, come together in Salina and Ahmett’s work to offer a possible theorisation of a new telemetric function and artistic method: telemetric feeling.