KAJE is pleased to present Cache Machine, a multimedia installation by New York-based collective 29 Speedway and founder Ben Shirken. The project is mounted as a short-run residency in KAJE’s ground level gallery, taking shape as a sound installation with interstitial performance programming on the exhibition's central 62-channel wavefield synthesis speaker array. On view January 10—January 25, 2026, the residency leans into the project’s capacities as an experiential interface for investigating the onslaught of transient digital material amassing in contemporary life.
The acceleration of industrial “intelligence” is leaving an immaterial debris field in its wake. In digital form, we call it “slop,” but its material detritus is (mostly) nameless. It’s felt in the bodies that live in the shadow of data centers. The constant hum of the server racks accumulate in the ears of neighbors. The machines are always on: buzzing and grinding at 70Db, 24/7.
Cache Machine is a durational performance by the debris of artificial “intelligence.” It brings the sonic wasteland of machinic materialism to KAJE as a somatic activation. The installation consists of an assemblage of curated components that {generate, delete, overwrite, denoise, renoise, block, amplify, spatialize} – a set of computational moves choreographed into a generative soundscape.
Over the course of the performance, a program cycles through the sounds of writing while erasing its own memory. A recorder captures the internal processes of a GPU rendering incomplete images. The work is a sensory scaffold. That is, an artistic intervention that takes latent forces beyond the human perceptual domain and renders them visceral, somatic, and residual. It is a direct encounter with the “sonic detritus” of the factory floor.
The Cache Machine is metabolic. A “cache” is an ephemeral waypoint where local memory is stashed for temporary usage and fast access. Data is written and evicted rapidly. The installation probes at the flood of neural media which is largely digital waste as soon as it is conceived. Its natural environment is the cache, to be cyclically written and rewritten under the banner of “progress.”
Describing a humanity that “proves itself by destruction”, Walter Benjamin observed that narratives of “progress” often obscure the “piling wreckage” it generates”. Cache Machine replicates the wreckage’s radiant hum. In doing so, it provides access to experiencing the (often restricted) territories of the “thinking” machines, hurling sonic psyops, dissonance, and spiking electrical strain in its wake.
– Ben Shirken & Johan Michalove
Cache Machine Programming
Opening Reception
January 10th, 2026
6—9PM
Performances by Lydo & C. Lavender
January 16th, 2026
Doors 7PM
Performance by Testu & Daniel Neumann
January 24th, 2026
Doors 7PM
