Recently I came across the work of Alison Bennett, senior lecturer in and associate dean of photography at RMIT, and a multimedia artist who works primarily in digital image and the "extended photography". Her practice explores themes of queerness and identity, neurodivergency, and the meeting of organic and artificial bodies, among other things, often through new media tools. From her website she writes:
My broader practice is situated in ‘expanded photography’ where the boundaries have shifted in the transition to digital media and become diffused into ubiquitous computing. Creative projects have tested the creative and discursive potentials of augmented reality, photogrammetry, 3D scanning, point clouds, virtual reality and webXR as encompassed by the medium and practice of photography. As a neuroqueer* new-media artist, I have explored the performance and technology of gender identity and considered the convergence of biological and digital skin as virtual prosthesis.
*a term Bennett uses to describe her existence and identity as both a queer and neurodivergent (autistic) artist
Exploring vegetal thinking, digital gardening and post-human neuroqueer phenomenology through the affordances of expanded photography, artist Alison Bennett considers Australian native flowers as celestial encounters. Slowly rotating 3D point-clouds of floral forms coalesce and dissolve – the authenticity of the image as loosely aligned imprecise points of reference folded into the immersive field of extended reality mediation. Rendered as point-cloud models, foliage structures
resonate as vibrant matter, testing the affordances of the digital image as a field of thinking.
Arising out of the heightened sensory perceptions of extended lock-down, this creative investigation began through contemplation of flowering street-trees. Through 262 days of lock-down, residents of Melbourne retreated to the hyper-local, often reinforced by a 5 kilometer travel bubble and a one-hour daily time-limit outdoors. The sublime ephemeral springtime flowers of street-trees were amplified by the extreme sensory and social constraints of social distancing. Drawing us into a suspended moment of slow encounter, we attuned to the contained glowing pulse of plants.
In this project, Bennett engages with ‘vegetal thinking’, a concept of critical plant studies that considers our symbiotic relationship with plants (Gibson 2018). This theoretical context is placed alongside the practice of ‘digital gardening’, of “seeds of thought cultivated in public” (Ness Labs) through slow thinking and organic speculation. Indeed, these domains of the vegetal and digital come together in post-human philosophy (Haraway 2016) and notions of compost and soil, seeking to subvert subject/object dichotomies. Mediated through an autistic queer lens (Yergeau 2018), Bennett’s work sides with the object, creating encounters that collapse the spectral, floral and machinic.
The work itself has been presented in a number of different ways - as printed image, as projection on the side of a large building during a festival, and as an interactive work (able to be moved, scaled and manipulated by the viewer's hands over a sensor connected to a screen). I find the latter interesting - I think in allowing people to encounter the digital object through touch, even if that touch is ephemeral, it brings a strange kind of physicality to an otherwise completely digital work. (See Instagram post to the below-right for a demonstration).
The element of "heightened sensory perception" in relation to lockdowns is something that I can relate to, as I'm sure many people can. With this in mind, part of me wishes in hindsight to have come across this before my EoY hand in last year as the way Bennett works with and through these themes resonates with me quite a lot, especially those around temporality, location, and the meeting of internal psychological states and exterior physical spaces during that period of time. I appreciate how the work has certain parameters around how it is made and the concepts it relies on - the specific window of time that lockdown was in place, the increased presence of digital media during that time, and the artist's own personal experience as a queer, autistic person.
(While I'm curious about artists whose processes or media are relevant to my practice currently, I'm more interested at present in learning about the methodologies of artists that might mirror or expand my own - its these parameters and the concept/narrative behind this work that drew me to it, not so much the medium, although that too is interesting and relevant.)
External link: https://alisonbennett.net/portfolio/2020/
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