The installation Biophilia will enable participants to interact with and generate organic forms based upon the distortion of the users shadow. Coined in 1984 by sociobiologist Edward O. Wilson, biophilia refers to the need of living things to connect with others - even those of different species. Biophilia attempts to absorb and synthesize users and their contexts, producing unpredictable patterns of propagation and hybridity.
A number of myths and metaphors are used to describe the origin of picture making, most of which involve shadows. Plato's Cave allegory describes how our understanding of the world through vision is not necessarily the same as what is physically visible. Within the installation Biophilia the participant and her shadow is synthesized into a larger cultural picture of self and place yet reduced to a derivative echo containing both, "resemblance and menace" .The shadow resembles the participant, a virtual manifestation of the relationship the user has with the screen. At once reduced to a 2 dimensional image which menacingly begins to merge with other organisms in the same screen space without consent nor care for the sovereignty of the users concept of self and space.
Within the installation Biophilia, the relationships between inside and outside can also be expressed between computer code and interiority, known and unknown. Code sits beneath the surface and can be autopoetic and capable of self-organization producing scary unknown emergent properties. The coding process although originally known produces these self organising properties in the darkness of the machine, eluding attempts to construct clean boundaries between known and unknown
Biophilia compacts the distance between subject and object, inside and outside. Where "the reproductive value of certain signs is dependent upon processes of symbiotic or co-evolutionary signification and communication." Likewise Biophilia creates hybrid forms, which emerge through the complex interaction between, theory and practice, matter and representation.
Where what matters is not necessarily human.
Biophilia was exhibited at
2007 "Bios4", Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo, Seville, Spain
2006 “Intersections" Siggraph2006”, Boston, USA
2006 ”FILE06” (Festival Internacional de Linguagem Eletrônica), Sesi Paulista's Espacio Cultural, Sao Paulo, Brazil
2006 “NewForms06,” Video Out Gallery, Vancouver, Canada
2006 “Collision 06”, University of Victoria, Victoria, Canada
2005 "BeapWorks", Perth International Arts Festival Curtin University, Perth, Australia
2005 “404 II International Festival of Electronic Art”, Patio De La Madera Rosario, Argentina