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 contemplating 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

"A Klee painting named ‘Angelus Novus’ shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet."

– Walter Benjamin, 1940s

Bios
29 Speedway (29S) is a music series, art collective, and record label with a focus on experimental electronic music and anti-disciplinary art. Founded in 2020 by Ben Shirken (a.k.a. Ex Wiish), 29S has hosted 50+ shows worldwide, working with artists such as Evicshen, James K, Flora Yin-Wong, Orchestroll, Dorothy Carlos, James Hoff, Jake Muir, Arushi Jain, Poncili Creación, Young Boy Dancing Group, and others. 29S has curated at Dripping Music & Arts Festival, Sustain Release, WSA, Rhizome, Pioneer Works, Market Hotel, IRL Gallery, Public Records, Light And Sound Design, and across Europe. They have been featured in Document Journal, Resident Advisor, Paper Magazine, ID Japan, Bandcamp, Artnet, Futurism Restated and First Floor. 

Ben Shirken is an artist whose work spans installation, generative music and film, audiovisual performance, and sound art. His practice contemplates how our current tools for communication, analysis, and production fundamentally alter our relationship to the present and yield alternative futures. Currently, he is investigating the conflicts resulting from the development of digital networks, automated systems, and AI. His work and performances have been presented at a range of institutions and festivals, including Pioneer Works, Cannes, Artissima, IFFR, WSA, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, New Museum, and Dripping Music and Arts Festival. Shirken is the founder of record label and performance series 29 Speedway, and is currently pursuing an MFA in Sound Art at Columbia University. 

Johan Ahlm Michalove theorizes neural media using computational “probes” into the current circumstances. He’s currently pursuing a PhD in Information Science at Cornell University, where he studies the temporality of computation in ordinary and crisis states. His work spans mutual aid, audio-visual installations, and new modes of publishing. Currently he’s interested in neuromorphic social computing–emergent social intelligence that mimics neural activity. He is the founder of mutua.nyc–a mutual aid infrastructure non-profit–and michalove.studio–a design practice where he collaborates with artists to build machines that resonate. He’s built digital activations that have been featured in Interview Magazine, Fast Company, and the Cornell Chronicle. 

Will Freudenheim builds games, films, and installations in New York. His work focuses on creating experimental games and virtual environments that bring together human, artificial, and biological participants. His projects cultivate shared digital worlds as experimental spaces for play, collaboration, and knowledge production. In 2021, he co-founded Laser Days, a worldbuilding studio where he currently works as a director and animation systems designer. Will is the co-editor of Interplay (2024), a book of essays which investigates the practice of using game engines to design shared worlds where different forms of intelligence meet and interact.

Cache Machine
29 Speedway
Artistic Direction & Concept - Ben Shirken
Computation & Theory - Johan Michalove
Installation - Duncan Davies
Additional Video - Will Freudenheim
Additional Installation - John Bemis