UnCalculated
- Medium Type
- A/V interactive installation work
- Year
- 2022
- Runtime
- 00:21:00
- Vsual
- Rewa Wright
- Music
- Simon Howden
- Tools
- Touch Designer
Extended Reality is normally considered to be something we do with computers: a human – computer interaction, but what if we also involved plants, as our nonhuman kin?
And then we extended that concept to include quantum entanglements as a feeling or phenomena we might apprehend through intuition? Nga manawataki o te koiora: Biorhythms, is a video piece that takes you on a journey into a computational transduction of the forest, rivers and oceans of Aotearoa/New Zealand.
Visually, an interconnected natural ecology is translated into the real-time world of audio reactive geometries and mesh topologies. The concept was to convey the feeling of these things, without literal interpretation. Traditional kete (woven baskets) inspire fluid movements which become pixel topologies.
Animated motion made with noise oscillators, shift from re-imagined nets used to catch eel (hiinaki), to seed pods exploding from pixel plants, such as the red pōhutukawa. The soft blue/green of kina (sea eggs) become fluffy vectors transparently overlaid on a fluid mesh of waves.
Following and modifying the tradition of naturalism and curvilinear geometry that marks traditional Māori art, this piece visually encapsulates the feeling of the natural world without being a literal representation that vested in Western pictorial traditions of realism.
This 20 minute piece, recorded as live audio reactive in Touch Designer, is sonically a composite of human-nonhuman music, alternately interspersed and mixed together. From the ‘human’ side, music consists of three original electronic compositions by Simon Howden. From the plant side, we intersperse original recordings of plant sonics captured in research since 2019. We consider plants to be co-composers of this work.
A previous installation, Contact/Sense was performed at the SIGGRAPH Asia Art Gallery in Brisbane 2019, and combined plant sonics with mixed reality. Donna Haraway introduced the notion of ‘companion species’ to describe non-human organic life forms that we co-habit alongside in society and culture. Plants and humans have lived alongside one another for thousands of years, in a co-dependant relationship of care and cultivation.
Biography
UnCalculated is the collective name of Rewa Wright & Simon Howden.
Rewa and Simon are practice based researchers using speculative methods to explore emerging technologies of sound and vision, with a focus on ephemera and frequency.
Their performances blend bespoke sonics with extended reality, haptic and gestural interfaces, and they often co-create with the nonhuman: plants and algorithms.
Their artworks have been recently included in various Ars Electronica Gardens (2020 and 2021), the SIGGRAPH Asia Art Gallery (2019), and in several iterations of the International Symposium in Electronic Art (since 2014).
