In my work, I create installations that confront nature with electronics, specifically using battery powered machines to amplify, light up, and move sculptural objects to occupy entire spaces. I’m interested in how technology governs our lived experience and how individual components can be mixed and matched into lasting forms and obsolete toys. My work is research oriented, spanning topics in physics from vibration to patterns in nature and biology to employ living matter into my work. This leads me into collaborations with fungi, plants and bacteria that serve as models for dynamic and circular life cycles. This process is accompanied with a passion for dissecting digital and mechanical devices in order to give life to my work.
In my latest exploration, SlimeWave (2022), I’ve taken a novel organism commonly known as Slime Mold (Physarum Polycephalum) and combined it with an analog synthesizer. This interaction opens the possibility to sonify elements of the creature’s internal chemical reactions over time into audible outcomes. Research on how to quantify this living data was cited from Andrew Adamatzky, who has written extensively on sensing and computing with slime mold. This approach has allowed me to process and take care of a living organism and integrate its emotional responses within an electrical circuit.
The use of biological components within technological devices provides a sense of agency to interact with electronics in a routine and caring context. By designing circuitry with materials that reduce our connection to precious metals, it can allow me to interact with devices in a way that changes day to day, giving them a lifespan that is finite and degradable. By employing these new relationships into my work, I aim to promote a future of electronics that works more like our biological counterparts, growing and evolving into unique entities that leave behind a subtle trace of their existence.
Disclaimer: All work represents the views of the INDIVIDUAL ARTISTS & AUTHORS who created them, and are not those of the school or museum of the Art Institute.
