Previously dominant certainties, mythologies and reductive dogmas are collapsing. This opportunity for a change of perspectives, opens for new narratives, imaginations, speculative futures and modes of navigation. INTERTIDAL SYNTHESIS explores an application and embodiment of the contemporary critical theories of Posthumanism, New Materialism and Ecocriticism, which calls for broader re-conceptualizations of what constitutes ‘Life’ and ‘Agency’. These theories consider a bio-techno-zoe sense of vitalist subjectivity, breaking down the border zones that demarcate between structural differences or ontological categorisations such as organic and inorganic, the born and the manufactured, metal and flesh, electronic circuits and organic nervous systems, nutrient and digital metabolism. Rather, these theories point towards a co-evolution of strange natures in hybrid configurations of multispecies relating in quantum entanglements. 

"Our world is pervious and fluid, and so must be the notions that help us to read and to describe its ecologies of ideas and bodies” - Serenella Iovino

INTERTIDAL SYNTHESIS is a sculptural video installation that explores relations in the borderlands and in-between-zones of machines and organisms, the technological and the biological. Soft robotic agents are filmed inhabiting and relating to different ecosystems such as Intertidal zones of the mudflats of South Korea and Denmark, a natural habitat in which evolution and adaptability are essential to large and constant ever changing flows of immersion and emersion, temperature, moisture and interactions with other life forms, Faxe Kalkbrud, an ecosystem of co-existance between human, nature and industry and Australian coastlines. Blurring the lines between organic and synthetic agency, this work explores a breakdown in the divisions between Nature, Culture, Human/Inhuman and Life/death continuums towards multidimensional relating.

3 channel video. 
Soft robotics, acrylic, steel

2019

Basecode.ino