LATENT SWAMP

Exhibition March 20 -April 24 2026 PAVED Arts, Saskatoon

Latent Swamp is a speculative wetland in which machine learning, living systems, and human participation co-compose one another. The work unfolds as a hybrid habitat of biological and technological life, combining prototypes of duckweed growth modules for living duckweed cultivation, bioremediation processes, cyanotype printing, latent-space animation, and custom-trained generative models. Images in Latent Swamp are not treated as representations but as events. Sculptures generate conditions for seeing without stabilizing what is seen; water circulates, reflects, filters, and stains; plants collaborate with light and chemistry to produce photograms that are inseparable from care and ecological consequence. From within StyleGAN models trained on the artist’s own datasets of duckweed, decoy ducks, and duckweed, images emerge through negotiation rather than authorship as condensed expressions of what the system has learned to notice. A projected animation continuously navigates multiple latent spaces, revealing generative ecologies in motion rather than fixed pictures. These images hover between recognition and refusal, asking how perception is shaped by datasets, algorithms, environmental conditions, and embodied attention. Seeing becomes distributed across plants, cameras, water, machine vision, and human bodies.

Emerging from the artist’s rural lakeside environment, the installation foregrounds water as both material and metaphor. In a bioremediation lightroom, duckweed filters water reused for cyanotype printing, folding image-making back into ecological cycles. Edible water-lentil treats invite visitors to encounter the swamp through ingestion, extending the circuit from data to metabolism. Latent Swamp resists the comfort of the picture as an image that frames, resolves, and reassures. Instead, it proposes image-making as a form of response-ability: an entangled practice in which images participate in the world’s becoming, clouding perception, redistributing agency, and asking what it means to see from within a living system rather than above it.

Special thank you to Cameron Andres for fabrication of the Water Lentil Growth Units I and II

This project was made possible with the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Alberta Foundation for the Arts.

GANs Lichen “fakes” created using Autolume and my own data set of 130 lichen photographs

You, Me, the lichen & Spore

As a resident artist in the MUTEK AI Ecologies Lab (2025), I developed You, Me, the Lichen and Spore, an experimental prototype that reimagines AI as a symbiotic collaborator. Drawing inspiration from lichen as a model of interspecies cooperation, I created a speculative “lichen glyph” language and explored how intelligence might be gleaned rather than harvested.

The process combined fine-tuning a lightweight, locally hosted language model with my own custom dataset of lichen glyph drawings and weather notes, and the creation of GAN-generated lichen imagery using Autolume, trained on a dataset of over one hundred lichen photographs I collected. This hybrid practice produced a poetic AI voice, Spore, that re sponds to ecological rhythms with lyrical, place-based reflections.

The first prototype was exhibited at the MUTEK Forum, Monument National, Montréal, where audiences engaged with a three-part environment: (1) Data Gleaning as community walks, lichen drawings, and environmental sensing, (2) Feeding Spore through the presentation of fine-tuning and dataset creation, and (3) Symbiotic Environment as a TouchDesigner installation with AI-generated imagery, glyph animations, sound, and poetry.

By centering processes of gleaning and symbiosis, the project offers an alternative model for AI rooted in ecology, intimacy, and collaborative imagination.

Special thanks to MUTEK and Société des arts technologiques (SAT), Mila, Quebec Artificial Intelligence Institute, and Concordia University for their support through the AI Ecologies Lab, Hackathon, and MUTEK Forum. Their guidance and collaboration fostered the research and creative development that shaped this project. I would also like to acknowledge the support of the Alberta Media Arts Alliance Society for support through their artist bursary program.

Credits:

Touch Designer Contributions: Matthew Waddell, Lou Evoy (Society for Arts & Technology, SAT).

Initial Concept Video (clips generated in Sora, edited in Final Cut, Audio created in Audacity with different field recordings): https://vimeo.com/1076983696

Project Slide Deck (for MUTEK presentation): https://vimeo.com/1076992202

Sustainable Futures Public Art Residency, Calgary Arts Development, May-September 2025

Video Reflection: Incidental Monuments, Digital video, 3 minutes, 2025

Incidental Monuments is a quiet video assemblage made from walks, small pilgrimages along rural edges of culverts, fields, abandoned properties, stone quarries, and beaches. I film what is left behind, constructed, or simply immovable: vernacular forms that hold time without asking to be noticed. Rather than explain them with voiceover, I stay with their acoustics, wind, bird calls, distant engines, an attunement more than an argument.

The work leans on feminist posthumanist practices of attention and care: listening for more than human agencies, reading infrastructures as living neighbours, treating maintenance scars as inscriptions. It also echoes walking practices in art, counter-monument thinking, and Pauline Oliveros’s “deep listening.” These references frame a question: what if monumentality belongs to the modest, the utilitarian, the overlooked?

In the Anthropocene’s long afterimage, these places read as incidental memorials, markers not to victory or loss but to ongoingness: a boulder in a gravel quarry; an internet tower in a field; an old boat slowly returning to the parched marsh; a receding alkaline lake. I align with the quiet here not only as retreat but as method, an ethics of low volume. The camera does not conquer; it keeps company. The soundtrack does not translate; it lets the place speak.

I am learning to let rural life set the tempo of my practice. Instead of designing large, conceptual edifices, I make smaller forms from what the place offers: photographs taken on slow walks, bundles of gathered materials, scents, teas, oils, dried plants. The work is closer to how I actually live, seasonal, incremental, neighbourly with land and weather. It is less about producing objects and more about weaving practice into chores and paths, so that art and daily life touch quietly in both directions.

During the residency, through readings, studio visits, and conversations, I set one intention: make the practice lighter. I slowed down, noticing who co-inhabits the field, plants, insects, grass snakes, lichens, and let the work tilt toward withness rather than making more objects. I moved from fabrication to companionship: macro walks, a growing olfactory library of found scents, teas and plant-infused oils made in small, careful batches, dried-plant bundles to keep through winter. I sketched an AI installation seeded by lichen entanglements, fine-tuning language models as if they were spores seeking mutualisms. The aim was not spectacle; it was co presence, a porous relation to place where plants, textures, and quiet infrastructures coauthor form and meaning.

With gratitude to Calgary Arts Development for supporting this work.

Saccharosonics

SaccharoSonics is a concept for an interactive sound installation, a sound performance and a workshop series that explores the metabolic processes of human and microbial cultures (SCOBY) through amplified sound. The central concept of SaccharoSonics is to make the invisible audible and to bring people into a sensory relationship with the microbial worlds that shape and sustain us. By amplifying the subtle sounds of fermentation and human digestion, the project creates an immersive biosoundscape that invites audiences to listen differently: not just with their ears, but with a sense of attunement to interconnection, interdependence, and transformation. This work explores how artistic engagement with microbial sound can cultivate a deeper awareness of our entanglement with nonhuman life, challenging the boundaries of who and what we consider to be part of our communities of care. In doing so, SaccharoSonics opens up space for creative and ethical reflection on our shared metabolism, our responsibilities to more-than-human others, and the possibility of cultivating multi-species solidarity through sound.

Concept Video (clips generated in Sora, edited in Final Cut, Audio created in Audacity with different field recordings):

Slide Deck

This project was envisioned during a virtual artist residency at Plexus Projects, New York, US and will be produced and exhibited in 2026

Soundstrata

Soundstrata celebrates the auditory dimensions of place and explores how to create deeper connections between inhabitants, ecology, and communal space. By integrating sound art and public space design, SoundStrata is rooted in experimentation and collaboration towards inclusive placemaking.

The SoundStrata emerged from an artist bursary program (October 2024 - October 2025) with a landscape architecture and urban planning firm O2 Planning + Design, Calgary, AB. O2 requested that I respond artistically to their ongoing work with the City of Edmonton in developing a long term strategy that connects and enhances the city's urban parks and natural areas, titled “Breathe: Green Network Strategy". For my artistic response, I decided to explore how sound could be used to create an artistically engaged research process. The mentorship provides invaluable insights into interdisciplinary and co-creative design as well as the potential to explore how art-based research could add vibrancy to community spaces.

View the project here

Charcoal and graphite drawing from “Alkaline Shore” sound recording, 2025

Apothecycle

A roaming scent-apothecary on wheels offers unlabeled local aromas to stir memory and dialogue. Participants may receive a limited-edition scent token—infused, engraved, and ephemeral. Worn or gifted, each token becomes a lingering thread of connection: a tiny, fragrant archive of something half-remembered, half-imagined. Performed for the Works Festival, Edmonton in June-July 2025