TechnoMorphism explores the relationship between nature spaces and digital technologies as understood through embodied experience. This body of work integrates these entities in unexpected ways, to upset the ease with which familiar meanings and divisions are assigned to these realms that may make them feel disconnected. Instead focus is placed on raising questions as to how these realms could be understood when recontextualised. Within this exhibition immersive projections, Realtime interaction and a combination of visual and audio responses are used to provide a sensory access point to the viewer’s body, taking the phenomenological approach of meaning-making through descriptive engagement rather than falling back on learnt attitudes.

 

Through my own research and artistic practice, I have become increasingly aware of how many shared networks the natural and the technological operate within. Physical spaces can be transformed into layers of data points and locative media and become realised as virtual spaces in the digital realm. Whilst the fluid spread of ecological information that is characteristic of organic and complex ecosystems of nature spaces can be increasingly drawn into the way in which we employ digital technologies. New Materialist philosopher Rosi Braidotti writes of the emerging nature-culture continuum that embodies the boundary-blurring tendencies within posthumanism. Instrumental to the transcendental capacity of this theoretical framework is the constant advancement of technology and its ability to become ever-more extended into the human and organic realms (Braidotti 2013:59).

 

Through my work this year, I have been able to tap into the languages humans share with machines, the ways in which images of nature spaces can be deconstructed into particles and reconstructed into new visual forms and how these technologies seem to be able to hear and see and learn. There is a prevalent concern of the dominating potential of digital technologies to advance to such a point where they eliminate the need for human involvement or existence However, these fears seem more indicative of the isolated manner in which we have learnt to approach the digital (Bogost 2012:64). I believe that through prioritising embodiment within our employment of technologies, they become symbiotic with the organic rather than threatening thereof.