ANIMOSA: An understanding of vibrant matter - towards an expanded creative field of awareness that may foster active phenomenological responses within different environments

Abstract

The ANIMOSA project explores potential responses to what has been recently described as a detached human experience. Embodying vibrant matter, artworks can potentially activate and expand environmental awareness. This type of enchantment is generated principally through experimenting with organic and inorganic material inherent in natural phenomena. Employing in my practice the developments in the contemporary arts and sciences, I explore the ways in which the natural environment increasingly exhibits its own material agency. In this existential, cultural and environmental quest, I consider the work of various theorists, including modern French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty and contemporary American political theorist Jane Bennett. While I remain grounded in their thought, I expand it into new areas of phenomenological and material engagement within my own practice. I question the proximities and boundaries between the animate, the inanimate and the immanent. I embrace materiality, specifically the autonomous trajectory of organic materials, while also providing an opportunity for reflecting on what it means to be a sentient being in the 21st century. Sentient (2017), the final artwork in the series is an immersive multimedia installation that engages both organic material and natural phenomena, intertwined with a time-lapse video, as well as sound and light effects. Composed of many multinucleate, unicellular[1] bright yellow Physarum polycephalum cultures fed with oats and growing in enclosed containers within a semi-dark environment, it has a life of its own. The Sentient (2017) habitat is subtly animated by a natural, self-regulating process in which the organic cells grow and transform themselves, and by an automatic, LED timed light system that gradually dims and brightens to best reveal the wondrous branching growth of the cell. Sentient (2017) aims to enchant by staging unexpected and intimate encounters with matter, and to reflect on organic spatial intelligence. In an alchemic interplay of positive and negative attractions, Sentient (2017) aligns human and nonhuman responsiveness with an environmental awareness. This work also anticipates the future direction of my research: the observation of smart living organisms capable of adapting to their surroundings and creating synergies within environments, and of phenomena that can contribute to an eco-phenomenological awareness by stimulating the development of an organic knowledge with an emphasis on sensory responses to it. [1] Dr M Beekman and Mr J Smith-Ferguson, 2018, in discussion with the author about Physarum polycephalum’s definition, February 1, 2018