Nga manawataki o te koiora: Biorhythms
Rewa Wright and Simon Howden
Medium: Video (2022)
Issues: Cyber Feminism, Māori New Media Art, and Plant Signals
Project Links
Description
Nga manawataki o te koiora: Biorhythms is a video 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 reimagined 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. 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 the 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-dependent relationship of care and cultivation. Applying the decolonial philosophy of mātauranga Māori (Māori epistemology), combined with posthuman lens to art and science, our hope is that through this artwork, people will feel a little closer to the hidden bio-electrical processes of plants, and consider plants not as a resource for extraction, but as a ‘companion species’ in a sustainable ecology.
The piece premiered in Whakatuu/Nelson, Aotearoa, as a large-scale projection applied to a building on 23 September 2022 as part of the Aotearoa Digital Arts Symposium.
Bio
Rewa Wright has been working with plants and algorithms in mixed reality (MR) since 2012 and has 20 years of experience in various aspects of photographic, moving, and virtual image creation. She is an interactive media designer and inverse technologist who combines artificial vision technologies with living plants and custom-built software to examine the conditions of our relationship to computation, plants, ecology, and the body. In 2020, Rewa curated the FASTlab Performance Experiment, an element of the international festival, Ars Electronica (commissioned by Newcastle Garden Creative Producer Dr. Kristefan Minski). Incorporating the work of 13 artists from Australia and New Zealand, this series of virtual interactive rooms was live on the Mozilla Hubs network for “In Kepler’s Gardens”, for the duration of the 2020 festival. Rewa has presented academic and artistic research internationally in Portugal, Canada, Hong Kong, Colombia, Spain, London, and New Zealand. Her research weaves together theory and practice in design practice and theory, cyberfeminism, interaction design, technoculture, camera-less photography, machine learning and other digital design techniques, to think through some of the thorny problems posed by our new hybrid physical and digital spaces. She is currently preparing her first monologue, on Posthuman Design. As well as a Doctorate in Art, Design, & Media from the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Rewa also holds a Masters of Literature in Art History, a Masters in Film, TV, and Media Studies, and a Post Graduate Diploma in Fine Arts (University of Auckland). Currently, she is a Lecturer in Design at the University of the Sunshine Coast, QLD, Australia. Rewa Wright’s cultural background is as a First Nations Māori artist, from the Ngai Tawake, Te Kaimaroke, and Te Uri o Hau hapu of Aotearoa/New Zealand. Indigenous practices are emergent in her live performances that incorporate and adapt gestures from traditional kapa haka and permeate her investigation of plant-data-body ecologies.
Simon Howden is an audio-visual artist and music producer. He creates bespoke soundscapes using plant bio-electrical signals and other experimental ephemera. Simon holds a Master of Fine Arts in Sculpture and Intermedia from Elam School of Art (University of Auckland). Notably, his experimental soundscapes were exhibited in the Ars Electronica Newcastle Garden (part of the international exhibition “In Keplers’ Gardens”, 2020). Simon has presented talks about his works in 6 countries. As a popular musician, he has over 25 million views on YouTube and is represented on most major streaming platforms. His instrumentals have featured on the Billboard charts with various international artists.