Rainforest Mind

On a residency at the Tanks Arts Centre in Cairns where the rain suddenly comes and goes every twenty minutes.  This R&D project, inspired by the book The Secret Life of Plants, is to use 3D stereoscopic animation as a means of exploring the imperceptibly animate environment that surrounds us.  In the first part of a three to four stage project (which also looks at desert, island and mountains) I am being immersed in the densest space overwhelmed by the fecundity of the living, similar to the chaos of a big city, but in nature.  I am right next to the Botanic Gardens and the Daintree and wanting to ask botanists and park rangers about the sentience of plants in controlled and wild environments.  The phenomenology of wildness is the energy behind re-compositing these unconscious relations of nature, sensory chaos makes the experience episodic, plants develop characters of their own but seem to live without memory and there is a beauty of death that shrouds their selfless existence.

Development presentation: Cairns Botanic Gardens Visitor's Centre, 6pm, 26th April 2012.