Abstract (Long paper)

Keywords: Biomimetic, Performative Materials, Synthetic Aesthetic Immersive Artwork, Algae, Bio Inspired, living and non-living.

In the last two decades, emerging fields alternately termed Synthetic Biology, Artificial-Life Art, Bio-inspired Design and Smart Materials, to name a few, have acted as loci that spawned new methods for creating novel artworks based on phenomena that is generally described as “natural”. At the same time, there has been increasing interest and research in creating differing kinds of immersive environments, responsive architectures and inhabitable worlds. Grene Epiphytes is an artwork that grew from an exploration of bio-inspired theories and a rethinking of engaging and immersive inhabitable aesthetics. It offers a perspective grounded in the lineages of immersive artworks and aesthetics that engage participants (not with representations of other life-forms, but) with non-human life-forms, and question the distinctions of human and nature. In this paper, we articulate assumptions and theoretical constructs that inspire our approaches for creating and “engineering” this artwork, and address some of the challenges. Rather than creating nature-like experience where humans are assumed to be at a remove, rather than part of nature, the inhabitable environment presented here is focused on a context enlivened by human and non-human entities, their varied responses to each other and to aspects of their intertwined worlds, as well as a questioning of materials

• Bio removed on request of the presenter
• Diane Gromala, Professor and Canada Research Chair, School of Interactive Arts and Technology, Simon Fraser University, BC, Canada. Diane is the Canada Research Chair in Computational Technologies for Transforming Pain and a Professor in SFU’s (Simon Fraser University’s) School of Interactive Arts and Technology. Her research works at the confluence of computer science, media art and design, and is focused on the cultural, visceral, and embodied implications of digital technologies, particularly in the realm of chronic pain. Gromala was one of the artists in the Art & Virtual Environments residency at the Banff Centre for the Arts from 1991-1993, and has been pursuing VR and other ways of transforming bodily experience (such as biomorphic typography; interactive books made of meat; and speculative wearables impregnated with things she grows, accompanied by Edgar and Hector, her crows) since that time. Since 1990, Gromala has co-created 7 interdisciplinary (art + science + cultural theory) grad and undergrad curricula at UTexas, USA, UW Seattle, USA, Georgia Tech, USA, Waikato University & Wanganui Polytechnic (New Zealand) and SIAT. People might want to talk to me about pain, perceptual and embodied transformation, pharmakon, working with physicians and health scientists, art+science, and/or ontological shenanigans. Or what it’s like to be older than dirt, to misspend one’s youth in the Silicon Valley, or to conduct ethnographic field studies of venture capitalists on the down-lo.
• Xin Tong is a MSc student under supervision of Dr. Diane Gromala at School of Interactive Arts and Technology, Simon Fraser University. She holds a Bachelor of Engineering degree from Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications. Her graduate research concentrates on how to alleviate chronic-pain patients’ pain on the basis of developing Immersive Virtual Environments. Her work focuses on Virtual Environments body interface and wearable technology, and interaction design.

Full text (PDF) p. 392-397