3RD SEMESTER BLOG

Moving away from 'assembly' and moving closer into 'growth'. Changing how we think about the world in binary terms of human, machine and nature and considering symbiosis. A material ecology as a way of being in the world.
What manages to live in the ruins we have made?
What life exists between capitalist destruction and collaborative survival?
Thinking beyond the Anthropocene with the science of imaginary solutions.

Original drawing, digitally manipulated 'grown', inverted and mirrored

'One, Becomes Two, Becomes Four...'

Charcoal drawing, exploring different effects.
Notes:
Conjuring hybrid plant-animals and their imagined habitats.
In an era defined by both new technologies and climate change, we increasingly understand ourselves as participants in a vast network of nonhuman relations.
organisms and artefacts.
visualize those networks
Imagined futures or alternate realities of
Inviting audiences to rethink the human position in the world, its relationship to all other life forms and to the various complex ecologies that bond beings together.
A growing awareness of living in an environmentally fragile planet and it’s incredible resilience, and adaptation to human action.
This has encouraged me to reconsider the role of art and in responding to current challenges.
Rethinking the relationship between humans and nature, the effects of changes to the earth's climate and the ways in which all species are caught together within complex causes and effects.
Neri Oxman on Material Ecologies




Notes:
Imagining digital landscapes. These are digital manipulations of sculptural objects from my second semester work. Thinking about futuristic worlds through digital manipulation techniques.
Methods:
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How can I create these environments?
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3D Scans of Objects to create digital environment,
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environment 'copy' digital casting, replication, multiplication and mirroring.
How to grow things on the internet??
Digital growth, digital meets organic. Blender stop frame animation of growing digital organism? - Reminds me of tamagotchi's

Field Recording
Recording of water pipes
Helping me to think about soundscapes that create an atmosphere.
Natural and otherworldly spaces
Spawn II
Editing videos in premiere pro, experimenting with software to create otherworldly forms - most useable software for my laptop and also most appropriate medium for storytelling and narrative building




All matter ultimately returns to the earth


Notes:
'Casting Life'
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Casting a plastic lizard toys found washed up at Seaton Carew Beach.
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Thinking about the materials we leave behind in our landscape.
Method: Direct Casting
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Allows me to interrogate key issues surrounding a post-anthroposcene. Thinking about the materials that we have put into the world, what will be left behind and what future generations will uncover from the earth.
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Blue pigment as a representation of the synthetic and the man-made, and symbolic of ancient representations of afterlife and rebirth. In contemporary society the "colour of the future" signaling a transition from the past to the present, from the analog to the digital.
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The lizard represents a bad omen and death in some ancient traditions, and contrastingly is also a symbol of resurrection, rebirth, and regeneration thanks to their ability of many lizard species to regrow their tails and also their ability to molt (shed their skins).
Surreal Storytelling through digital installation.
Watery Bodies
water flows through bodies, species and materialities
watery interactions and circulations
Suddenly, something very distant and remote feels up close and intimate.
vulnerability
understanding your own interconnected body
we have exploited the resources of the planet
and other bodies
how we might we become better to accommodate multispecies living and caring for hybrid creatures for our future world



How can I bring together my digital and sculptural content?

Is a digital Map of an Archeological Site from the future. Explore the different excavation sites to find objects and artefacts from a future ecosystem.
Planning of digital interface to present research and development of ideas to a digital audience or for anyone who wanted to find out more about my work and ideas.

This is a map of my location during lockdown. I have been exploring the terrior of each habitat, and illustrated my surroundings into one haunted landscape that floats in a void. Because where I am right now, isolated to select locations, I feel as though I am trapped in a strange space of time, in which I am re-learning what exists within this space.
OBSERVATIONS: This morning I woke up to thousands of mushrooms growing in my garden. Overnight they has spread.












Casting works: Thinking about how to present the casts.
Inspired by the mushrooms that I had seen that morning and Helen Chadwick's Piss Flowers, I found this an appropriate way of relating them to the book I had been reading g mushroom at the end of the world by Anna Tsing.





Things that grow in haunted places: Ghost Mushroom Inspired by Helen Chadwick's Piss Flowers Sculptures and Anna Tsing's book The Mushroom at the End of the World.
Future fossils of things that will not exist any more haunt the landscape, they are beautiful yet eerie and unfamiliar. Harking back to things we might lose to the rapid changing of our landscape. All that might be left is a shell of the things we used to know.
My next septs are to make 4 more to create a 'colony' and take them outside to photograph them against different landscapes.




Observations today: Three eyed crane stands silent and still on the edge of the river. It's presence is there to ward off pests. What is a pest? A foxglove droops to the floor and shrivels to a brown dust.
First sequence of edited video footage
PREP FOR VIDEO ESSAY
THINGS THAT GROW IN HAUNTED PLACES
Video Essay: Ghosts and Monsters of After the Anthropocene
Water flows through bodies, species and materialities. Bodies left on the shore after the highest of tides. A cadaver becomes the diagram of its own condition, a fossilised ghost of a future past. They grow from within our haunted soil, sprout and flourish and suddenly, something very distant and remote feels up close and intimate. They inhabit our liminal spaces, shores, rivers and disturbed forests, continuing to remind us of our complex and unstable world, but also of the possibilities of life, as all matter ultimately returns to the earth.These are the things that will grow in the haunted landscapes we have made. Think about the materials that we put into the world, our toxic chemicals and material waste gradually melt into the earth. Crushed plastics and synthetic liquids, watery bodies eat them or are eaten by them. Animals and objects disappear into themselves and are reborn into vibrant beasts. They split, swell and rupture, divide and multiply. One becomes two, becomes four, production and reproduction. Resurrection, rebirth, and regeneration, and the gods of the new world are born. Object-Animal species hybrids, a hope for life after death. The future is symbiosis. The hermit crab finds its new home within a plastic shell, a contemporary armour, a synthetic skin, transforms into a celestial being. The pregnant lizard sheds one tail and grows three. The blue heron submerged into the toxic river reappears with multiple heads. The sting ray eternally rotates in the aquarium like a plastic bag in the ocean. Entanglements across boundaries allows for collaborative survival.
SOUNDSCAPES FROM THE NEW WORLD

Used a combination of soundscape patches from the Omnisphere and Logic Pro libraries.
For creature call I used drones, a rattle, two water sounds and a whirring creature like sound and heart beat to mimic a sea creature
For the voice over I shifted the voice down a semitone or so to create a ‘beyond human’/ hybrid / cyborg voice
How would our soundscape alter as nature shifts and adapts to survive through ecological crisis and change?
What kind of species will dominate the soundscapes of our future, what will they sound like?



Marguerite Humeau: Similarly has works with mutated and/or duplicated bodies.

LOCATIONS, HABITATS AND 'TERRIOR'



'Terrior' a term used by Jeff Vandermeer in The Southern Reach Trilogy
Where do these things exist?
What characterises their environment?
How do things inhabit the space?
What caused the formation of this habitat?
What does it's characteristics tell us about the significance of the place in relation to all other places?
What does it tell us about our future, past and present?

ONLINE CURATION

How do the works that I've made and the idea's I've investigate exist together in a digital environment?
How can I curate the works to tell a story but also give the participant the agency to direct their own narrative?
How can I organise my works so that I can fabricate the 'terrior' of the entangled areas of my research?
