GALLERY 2012

Description of campaign/project

WHAT: Finitude is a powerful, whimsical responsive installation for individuals who recline underneath the work and interact, whilst other audience members can watch simultaneously. It seeks a multimodal form of communication that includes all bodily senses and involves both touch sensitive interactivity, 3D moving imagery, moving sculptural objects, lighting and multi-channel sound. It was originally envisaged and developed during a residency with the Australian Wildlife Conservancy NGO the Mallee scrublands of NW Victoria, Australia, and was first presented site-specifically in a motel room in the country town of Mildura.

Participants lie underneath a semi transparent, multi-touch sensitive screen surface which they can activate through the lightest of touches. Upon this same screen falls a digital projection created using real time 3D software. Depending upon the ever changing qualities of this image participants can at times see through the semi transparent screen surface to a series of physical ‘dioramas’ suspended above that are lit by computer-controlled subtle LED spotlighting. These ‘dioramas’ consist of slowly rotating physical objects that in combination with the screen projections create realtime, highly spatial compositions for the viewers - whimsical ‘landscapes’ that combine both 'real' and '3D virtual' media.  The work is accompanied by a rich, responsive 4 channel spatial sound work that draws inspiration from the biology, ecology and techno-cultural landscapes of the Australian arid regions.

Finitude (Mallee: Time) was inspired through a series of recent visits and residencies in Australia's outback Mallee desert country. Further drawing on recent writings by Australian post-colonial author Paul Carter, the work is envisaged as an evolving ‘personal topography’ of place-discovery. By contrasting and melding readily available generalisations of the Mallee regions’ rational surfaces, climatic maps and ecological systems with what Carter calls “a fine capillary system of interconnected words, places, memories and sensations” generated through my own idiosyncratic research processes, Finitude (Mallee Time) invokes a “dark writing” of place through outside eyes - an approach that avoids concentration upon what 'everyone else knows', to instead imagine and develop a sense how things might be. This non didactic form of communication and process is I believe sets the context through which the critical conversations we need to have can emerge.

This basis in re-imagining and re-invention becomes the vehicle for the work’s more fundamental intention - as a meditative re-imagination of 'time' (and region) as finite resources: Towards this end, every object, process and idea in the work is re-thought as having its own ‘time component’ or ‘residue’ that becomes deposited into our 'collective future'. Thought this way Finitude (Mallee Time) suggests the poverty of predominant images of time as ‘mechanism’ to instead envisage time as a plastic cyclical medium that we can each choose to ‘give to’ or ‘take away from’ our future. Put another way - time has become finitude.

It is a truism to say that this work can only exist because of the participatory relations that are developed with its active audiences - both as direct interactors and viewers - and its imitial display in a motel room context indicates its capacity to comfortably operate outside traditional institutional sites or related conventions. In this sense participatory art and eco-cultral communication are the core principles that feed, drive and evolve it.

My works engage with central concerns of ecology that underpin our ethical and political life, focused upon furthering human well being, and by extension, nonhuman well being - through re-understanding, re-evaluating and then choosing how to better act with wisdom and contextual sensitivity. Each new project is conceived under the broad aegis of philosophical ecology and is part of a thinking-through and writing-about process that has always been central to my life as a practitioner. My practice, its theoretical development and the production of the works seek to embody principles of an 'ecosophy'. An Ecosophy is a philosophical position or form of self-realisation that a subject (i.e. you or I) might embody over time. I use it within the term 'ecosophical art practice' to describe what I am attempting to achieve.


This is best thought of as being part of a broader process of making sense of the world, and hence a way of determining my engagement with it. The approach of an ecosophy is deeply entwined within human concepts of individualism, difference, gender and morality; in other words all of what it means to be a human acting in relationship and dependence upon others.

That our collective ability to sustain the future is as much a cultural problem as it is an economic, environmental or technological one. At every stage of the working process I asked myself: what was I doing to advance ‘sustainment’ and how might I also be inadvertently sustaining the unsustainable? I realised therefore that if I refused to struggle with these questions then I would become a part of the problem. This was a key driver for this project.