Rewa Wright, Simon Howden. Juried Artist
Constellations
Installations at QUT Kelvin Grove
Artist Statement
He Koiora o te Wa: a Biology of Time is an interactive installation combining bio-electrical data, real-time animations and living plants, in a poetic and sophisticated experience for a participatory audience. The concept is to reveal the hidden signals produced by living plants, through sonification and data visualisation that brings humans closer to understanding that plants are not simple ‘passive machines’, but that they communicate through energy and life force. He Koiora o te Wa can be translated as the ‘biology of time’ in the ancestral language of Rewa Wright, te reo Māori. Looking beyond the lens of Western epistemology and the scientific discourse on plant biology, this artwork examines the complex interrelationships between humans and plants. Drawing on the cultural knowledge system of Rewa’s culture, mātauranga Māori (Māori epistemology), plant-human relations can be approached from the perspective of genealogical connections, embedded in bloodlines that co-mingle earth, sea, sky, and water, with human and plant kin. Like humans, plants are considered to have mauri (energy) and wairua (life force). Plant rhythm is phenological, and traces processes such as photosynthesis and osmosis as plants pursue circadian patterns of growth, seeding and decay. The title of this work, He Koiora o te Wa: Biology of Time, refers to the different temporality or chronobiology of plants vested in seasonal shifts and dependent on temperature, water and light.
Re-framing plants as co-composers or companions in an artistic process moves beyond the human-centered philosophy of resource extraction, where plants are often seen as ‘passive machines’. Our approach activities a expanded understanding of plant processes by making the electrical signals manifest as sonic frequencies. Furthermore, since audience can touch the plants and shift the frequencies, people gain an understanding of the hidden operations of plants and how we can communicate with them through a sharing of bioelectrical signal energy transduced as aural and visual data. Several plant neurobiologists (such as Stefano Mancuso and Monica Gagliano) have noted the signals that plants emit are akin to intentional communication and sentience, and this is now a recognized area of scientific study.
About the artists
UnCalculated Studio explore speculative futures where plant signals, human music, computational data collide, in a sophisticated audio-visual experience. 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. Rewa has presented academic and artistic research internationally in Portugal, Canada, Hong Kong, Colombia, Spain, France, U.S, U.K, South Korea and Aotearoa/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. Rewa’s cultural background is Māori, from the Ngai Tawake, Te Kaimaroke, and Te Uri o Hau hapu of Aotearoa/New Zealand. 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). Simon has presented talks about his artistic research in 6 countries. As a popular musician, Simon collaborates primarily with Jamaican, Caribbean diaspora and Latin reggaeton artists, and is represented on most major streaming platforms. His instrumentals have featured on the Billboard charts in versions by various artists, including Busta Rhymes, Popcaan, Vybz Kartel, Lumidee, Sizzla Kalonji and remixed into live performances by Wyclef Jean.
Credits: Wright & Howden (UnCalculated Studio)