This body of work considers the visual and conceptual view of the boreal forest ecosystem through ecological, human, and technological perspectives. It counters anthropocentric conceptions of how humans relate to the ecological world by considering how humans, ecology, and technology are co-evolved and deeply entangled. Working through close-up, human-scale, and aerial imagery and through digital manipulation and collaging, the works favour a worldview that incorporates each of these three forces and displaces a (western) human-centric viewpoint. By exploring how we might see ecology differently than our current worldview allows, the work opens up new perspectives from which we can begin to honestly address the possibility of a future in a drastically altered climate.
Photo intaglio, 5x7.5 to 10x11” on BFK Rives.
Graphite and coloured pencil, 3’6” x 8’ 6”, 2019
2017. Drypoint with selective wiping on Japanese paper.
Cling wrap, projected light. Size variable, approx. 12’x5’x3’ (2019).
For complications of an autonomous world, I was interested in exploring the ways we envision AI and how it is changing the way we view ourselves.
Using knitting as code, I “programmed” myself and three individuals to work independently and simultaneously on a single piece using our bodies as knitting implements. The use of the human body as a way to enact code highlights the limits of machine learning: with no body to consider, the machine is unable to understand the restrictions and abilities of a physical body. The lack of pattern or goal enabled the participants to exercise choice within the constraints of the code.
In its typical use, cling wrap is a weightless, transparent material that, under tension, is vulnerable to punctures and tears. Used in quantity, it accumulates mass, opacity and strength and becomes present as a body. Suspended in the dimness and reflecting the projected light, it is an eerie object without purpose, and embodiment of both code and the human body and therefore a kind of analogue hybrid of the two. At a time when AI is being developed to replicate human labour for the sole benefit of capitalism, efficiency, compliance and purposefulness are favoured over autonomy and self-actualisation. At the same time, non-replicable “human” qualities—ingenuity, imagination, independence--become reserved for the few that control the encoding of AI. This piece seeks to question the absurdities of a machine autonomous world and to remind us of the exquisite and fallible state of human existence which cannot be replicated by the encoded machine.