5. podscape (wip)
“Podscape” is a story / processing network – an installation system of pods that represent various plants, animal, human, mycelium, things set in the time of the Capital/Anthropocene. Each pod has their own story, and are a collection from various people co-created with nonhumans. The co-creation between nonhuman and nonhuman manifests in a machine-learning model trained on extinct bird sounds. All these elements contribute to an audio-sensory and interactive installation.
Co-creators participate in a workshop ritual “Embodied Storytelling/’Nature’ Portal”, that generates pod stories and simultaneously creates the world communally. Creating stories through somatic exercises that attune participants to non-dominant forms of sensing/information receiving from nonhumans, accompanied with writing exercises.The workshop looks at the binary of fiction & non-fiction specific to the english language, natureculture divide, animism, perspectivism, nonhuman communication and vital materiality. Additionally, the ritual is a reproducible experience that can exist separately from the podscape.
I’m also training a machine learning model trained on collected extinct bird recordings using WaveGAN. WaveGAN is a machine learning algorithm which learns to generate raw audio waveforms. This is a celebrating their existence along with mourning their extinction. The model explores the queering of dead and living, a liminal chimera of species that normally wouldn’t interact in close physical proximity. It interacts with something “dead” regeneratively.
https://soundcloud.com/nire/sets/non-human-embodiment/s-bjReq
*final documentation pending* - two stories from the workshop ritual situated in the installation. Materials: bioplastic, ecopoxy resin, cactus, fungus, discarded cellphones and pagers, stones, moss, chicken wire.