Mellifluous Generator

Particle & Wave Festival, Emmedia, Calgary, 2022
Media Installation

Materials: Two contour-shaped light tables, eight hand-blown glass vessels, microphone and stand, amplifier, mixer, custom electronics
Photo Credit: Chelsea Yang Smith

Mellifluous Generator is an experiment in attunement and an invitation to consider water as an active archive, a resonant vessel that remembers sound, touch, and encounter. Eight glass vessels, each filled with water collected from local waterways, rest on topographic light tables that trace the subtle contours of a shifting landscape.

Visitors are asked to speak or vocalize into a microphone; their voices are transmitted into the waters, sending ripples of vibration through each vessel. In this moment, the body’s breath and the river’s memory meet.

The installation imagines water not as inert material, but as a collaborator, capable of holding stories, responding to affect, and echoing the long histories of the environments from which it was drawn. Through this intimate exchange, Mellifluous Generator asks whether our voices might soften into listening, and whether sound can become a bridge for renewed ecological kinship.

Algorithmic Assemblage: Rhizome, Gastropod + Brain Coral

2022 | 2D Work (Laser-Engraved Acrylic, LEDs, Wood Frame)
Dimensions: 24” × 60”
Photo Credit: Chelsea Yang Smith

This illuminated panel brings three evolutionary figures, rhizome, gastropod, and brain coral into conversation across layers of engraved acrylic. LEDs embedded within the frame animate the etched forms, revealing filaments, spirals, and branching patterns that pulse with an uncanny biological luminosity.

Algorithmic Assemblage explores the thresholds where organic growth meets computational logic. The work reflects on how living systems encode knowledge through repetition, bifurcation, adaptation, and how digital technologies echo, extend, or distort these inherited patterns.

Rhizomes widen the field of connection. Gastropods trace soft, slow arcs of perception. Brain corals grow in ridged architectures reminiscent of neural networks. Together, they offer a speculative map of relational intelligence: one shaped not by extraction, but by entanglement.

Supported by a research-creation grant from the Canada Council for the Arts, this work continues an inquiry into the aesthetic, ecological, and algorithmic systems that shape more-than-human worlds.