Seed Systems: Speculative ecologies in XR Art Today 2.0

A second edition emerges one year later:

Artists:

Alison Bennett (AUS) | Nicholas Delap (UK) | Matthew D. Gantt (US) | Mohsen Hazrati (IRN/DE) | Nadine Kolodziey (DE) | Lauren Moffatt (AUS/DE)

Grappling with climate change and collective cooperation, a collaboration emerges as the XR art exhibition: Seed Systems. Six international artists who specialize in virtual world-building and plant knowledge, explore speculative approaches to future human-nature relationships, using new digital media art to cultivate an immersive garden of growth and foliage. Surpassing borders and moving between realities, Seed Systems brings perspectives from other places to Tkaronto/Toronto as an exchange between the exhibition visitors and artists responding to our current climate crisis and envisioning potential futures together.

Initiated by STYLY

Curated by Miriam Arbus (Sky Fine Foods) and Peggy Schoenegge (peer to space)

In cooperation with SOMA Berlin and Radiance

Opening event (all welcome): 21 September, 2023 6:30pm-8:30pm

Follow @stylyglobal @peertospace @skyfinefoods @radiance_vr

Looking back at our histories of connection to places, while looking ahead into the futures shaped by our dreams and expectations. Artists Elina Lex, Akshata Naik, Amanda Amour-Lynx, Tru Elmore, Curtia Wright and curator Miriam Arbus come together in an exhibition of digital sculptures activated with augmented reality technologies. 

Welcome to Geary Avenue, a neighbourhood in flux where ghostly imprints of neighbourhoods pasts intertwine with our experiences. New buildings and structures replace our remembered landscapes, amidst rapidly increasing land prices, land use regulations. Long histories stemming from indigenous travel routes, river ways no longer exposed, and an old town centre commercial strip - to the mixture of industrial/warehouse and automotive spaces evolving into a quickly gentrifying hub of creative enterprises and studios. And train tracks: always moving, always through.

We invite visitors to participate, exploring the Geary stretch and reinventing the ways we navigate through space.

Each artist plants a digital object, ethereal site-specific sculptures that emerge upon interaction. Metaphysical portals that open a shared experience of place while initiating self reflection.

There is an opportunity for visitors to situate within the city and inspect our own place within these frameworks. 

It is our own imprint on spaces that marks the change. 

We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts to enable this Digital Now project.

Please tag @canada.council  and use hashtag: #Bringingtheartstolife

@skyfinefoods @elina_lex @tru_dee @amour.lynx @akshata.naik @curtia

Oliver Pauk’s inaugural collaboration with Sky Fine Foods, is an accumulation of time and work from the past 5 years. Finely textured forms emerge as attentive explorations of hand and digitally-processed objects, challenging expectations of physical and digital art. 

Expanding the pursuits of earlier work, Pauk involves an ongoing investigation of the dimensionality between the digital, abstraction, and representation. In his newest works this is continued via hand-carving methods on soft woods and high-density foam. 

This progression replicates visual elements and patterns often seen in computer-aided fabrication processes. The resulting presentation is a collection of 3D printed, CNC milled, and hand carved sculptures, alongside video and Augmented Reality (AR) objects. The works evolve between mediums, acting to blur divisions between the physical and the digital, the tangible and the intangible.

New hand carved sculptures demonstrate a technical precision that Pauk followers have grown to expect. Each has been created in an exploratory and extemporized manner that welcomes unexpected extrapolations of the artist’s aesthetic decisions. Pauk oscillates fluidly between hand and mechanical processes, yielding impromptu abstractions. Each work becomes a composition of intention and improvisation; unexpected forms and seductive material textures combine into a visual trickery that eludes categorisation. 

Artists:

Alison Bennett (AUS) | Nicholas Delap (UK) | Matthew D. Gantt (US) | Mohsen Hazrati (IRN/DE) | Nadine Kolodziey (DE) | Lauren Moffatt (AUS/DE)

Grappling with climate change and collective cooperation, a collaboration emerges as the XR art exhibition: Seed Systems. Six international artists who specialize in virtual world-building and plant knowledge, explore speculative approaches to future human-nature relationships, using new digital media art to cultivate an immersive garden of growth and foliage. Surpassing borders and moving between realities, Seed Systems brings perspectives from other places to Berlin as an exchange between the exhibition visitors and artists responding to our current climate crisis and envisioning potential futures together.

Initiated by STYLY

Curated by Miriam Arbus (Sky Fine Foods) and Peggy Schoenegge (peer to space)

In cooperation with SOMA Berlin and Radiance

At: SOMA 300 Berlin, Eylauer Strasse 9, 10965 Berlin (DE) and online via STYLY

Duration: September 10 - 30, 2022

Opening: September 9, 2022, 6 - 10 pm

Closing event: September 30, 2022, 5-9 pm

Accompanying Event Schedule tba on Instagram >>> Follow @stylyglobal @peertospace @skyfinefoods @radiance_vr

Link for Press Kit: https://drive.google.com/drive/u/0/folders/1okU05GOgV2FihNsm-1EDorqGRDJiqiZE