I work in ground mineral pigments and walnut oil on stretched or suspended canvas, panel, and acrylic on oversized paper. Compositions are improvised. Sizes vary from 24” - 96”+

I began as a painter in 2001, trained in the discipline of surface, gesture, and colour before my practice grew outward into video, sound, media arts, social practice, and installation. Painting has always remained a quiet through-line as a place where ideas first take shape, where thinking becomes embodied, and where I return to steady my hand and attention.

Though much of my early work has been lost through moves, transitions, and the shifting terrain of my career, painting continues as a behind-the-scenes practice that anchors my larger multidisciplinary world. I approach each canvas as a site of attunement and inquiry, a way to sense through colour and form what later emerges in my ecological, sonic, and relational projects. I will continue to paint, as a private laboratory, a companion practice, and a place of ongoing discovery.

A series of spontaneous early morning drawings, coloured pencil on paper.

Plantling a Promise, 2022 Site Specific Installation, The Works Festival, Edmonton, AB

Over several days, live sunflower plants were given away to visitors in exchange for a promise; a promise of kindness, stewardship, care, collaboration, love, respect… made sincerely to plants, trees, to vegetal life and all living creatures. The promise’s were painted on a piece of fabric and attached to the geodesic dome.

Photo Credit: Kev Liang, 2022

Particle & Wave Festival, Emmedia, Calgary, 2022

Mellifluous Generator
2022 | Media Installation

Materials: Two contour-shaped light tables, 8 glass vessels, microphone and stand, amp, microphone mixer, custom electronics

This interactive installation invites visitors to engage directly with the concept of water as a carrier of memory. Eight glass vessels, each filled with water sourced from different local waterways, are placed on contour-shaped light tables. A microphone and stand positioned in front of the sculpture enable visitors to speak or vocalize toward the waters, transmitting their voices into the vessels through an amplification system. The work explores the idea that water holds memory and can be affected by sound, gesture, and experience, fostering a contemplative dialogue between the viewer and these vital ecosystems.

Algorithmic Assemblage: Rhizome, Gastropod + Brain Coral
2022 | 2D Work

Dimensions: 24” x 60”
Materials: Laser-engraved acrylic, wood frame, LEDs

This intricate piece merges the organic and the algorithmic, presenting engraved depictions of rhizomes, gastropods, and brain coral in layered, illuminated acrylic panels. LEDs integrated within the wood frame highlight the fine details of the engraving, evoking a sense of connectivity and evolution between natural forms. The work suggests an ongoing interplay between biological systems and digital interventions, drawing attention to the interconnected patterns that sustain life.

Photo Credit: Chelsea Yang Smith

This project is supported by a research-creation grant from The Canada Council for the Arts.

Les yeux dans l’eau, Curated by Geneviève Wallen, Foreman Art Gallery of Bishop University in Sherbrooke, QC

Memory of an Imaginary Aqueous Garden, 2021, (blown glass, metallic textile, seeds and grains, tubing, air pump, PLA 3D printed objects, polymer clay, paint, aquatic plants) is a dynamic sculpture where water, growth forms inspired by underwater places, reflections of light, air, and plant life intermingle in a performative play.

During this phase of the series, I explore a natural healing system that uses the unique vibrational imprint of different plants immersed in water to create elixirs. The Bach Flower remedies (created by Edward Bach,1886-1936, a British doctor, bacteriologist, homeopath, and spiritual writer) is a collection of remedies from 38 flowering plants and trees that align with psychological qualities or patterns in the human psyche. The vibrational nature of the remedy is used to unblock a negative pattern causing disturbance and create a sense of balance and harmony. The system requires learning about the qualities of plants and trees and how they may parallel or connect to human states. This learning requires ongoing self reflection and attention to the emotional states of self and others in various situations. In the process of learning about the system one is in a heightened sense of being, tuning in to people, creatures, and plants.

In my experiments, I’ve collected and created flower essences from both “wild” flowers (on the land by my family home near Nevis, Alberta (Tail Creek) and those from my backyard garden in the city of Red Deer, Alberta (Treaty 6/7, Waskasoo Seepee). I focused on different flowers that I was drawn to, as a form of honing in. Certain plants seem to keep appearing or have a magnetic attraction, specifically yarrow, fireweed, goldenrod, borage, hollyhock, and wild rose.

The digital video (8.45 minutes) titled,

I’m a fly with one eye,

windsong’s tide amongst

our perpetual autoflow, 2022, (7 minutes) provides glimpses of some of the flowers and the two places (rural pond bank, urban backyard) I collected essences from. The original Bach method is to pick the flowers as they are fully open and soak them in spring water in the full summer sun for a few hours. I’ve designed and commissioned hand blown glass vessels that can be suspended in different locations so that the flowers are not picked/removed from the plant. These are demonstrated on the artwork Tree, 2022, (wood dowel, aluminum cast branches, blown glass, water, flowers, string, metallic textile, grain, plaster).

The stainless steel lasered wall panels, (24”x24”), Meditations on Water, are a series of drawings taken from thinking with the idea of the vibrational imprint cast from an entity in water. From the micro to the macro; from the potential of an ice crystal in a black hole to a raindrop dripping off the back of a snail shell into the parched soil; how are forms and elements perpetually cycling into one another?

Photos: François Lafrance, permission de la Galerie d'art Foreman

This project is supported by a research-creation grant from The Canada Council for the Arts.

6 Channel Video Installation: (3 sizes of HD flat screens 36-60”, 3 tablets, suspended horizontally, vertically and on floor, ) HD Digital Videos, 1-5 minutes each, looped.

Installation : Compressed earth/soil, sand, clay, compacted to form as base and column (made on site using a pre-cut mold), scaffolding (steel tubing, powder coated - AV and power cords run through tubes) for tablets/display, laser cut acrylic with copper etching form fractal sea-fan antenna - 10 “trees” in cluster. Coral brains, 3D scan and print cast in hydro-cal (1000 pieces) strung on scaffolding as counting “beads” abacus.

This project is supported by the Alberta Foundation for the Arts Project Grant 2018.

Cosmograms, 2018 - Banff Residency open studios

Oil paint on canvas 60”x60”/paper 48”x 200”, sculpted beeswax on copper wire, bronze coral, aluminum sticks (willow, ash, poplar), 3D prints in wax/PLA, tuning forks, laser etched baltic birch, video, various textiles, foam, hydra-cal coral casts. A video and installation that includes lichen, coral, thirty-year-old beeswax, fractal antennas, bronze, and textiles. This project began at the Banff Centre for the Arts thematic residency “Outdoor School” in summer 2018. The work is based on the interconnectedness of living beings and asks what kinds or forms of information is alive and moving in planetary patterns among different phenomena? What kind of duration exists for creatures that are potentially immortal (such as lichen)?

2018 - Banff Residency open Studios

An ongoing video performance “semiotic wilds” is a series of intra-actions between the places I inhabit or visit where by letting a gesture slowly emerge through ‘feeling’ a site, in an attempt to evoke spontaneous semiotic relations with different plants and creatures.

Video Installation at Never Apart, 2017, for Site and Sound New Media Festival, Eastern Bloc, Montréal, QC,CAN.

Video projection, Closer to Home, HD 7minutes, takes the viewer into a disorienting plant immersion.

VI: Vegetal Intelligence, a model based on quantum mind, a growing labyrinth, 3D printed parts, plants, various electronics, hand-blown glass, custom plinths, various "artifacts".

Marma Harp, An irregular polyhedron body harp/instrument experimentation in "tuning" for intergalactic/dimensional communication frequencies. Vibrational research in sound and live performance.

The supports and some parts of the sculptures were fabricated with CNC router, laser cutter and 3D printer. Much of the research and experimentation combines biologically inspired and traditional hand made artisan techniques with the recent imaging and computer controlled technologies.

Video commissioned for Sandstone City exhibition, Lougheed House, Calgary, 2018.

Audio/Video Installation. Audible Vegetal Visible Animal Magic Mineral: Semi-Postanthropocentric Reenactments for a Terracqueous Orb, 2017, The Garden of Speculations, articule, Montreal.

Installation at Maison des Arts de Laval, Ville de Laval, 2017.

Communally contemplate possibilities for extra-dimensional voyage, kinship, and symbiotic bonding between earthbound entities.

The Ancestry of Objects is a series of live-set or performative installations with stop-motion animations, painting and drawings, and a number of sculptural props or residues. The animations portray the development of material compositions slowly evolving, enacting and capturing nonlinear narratives in four chapters; Ontologies of the Sublime, the 3-3-Day-Wars, Year of the Chimera, and Revelations and Hyperobjectivity.

Artist Statement

The Ancestry of Objects is an exploration of transformation, narrative, and materiality, where the boundaries between objects, stories, and processes blur into a dynamic continuum of creation, decay, and reemergence. The project uses clay—a fundamental and malleable medium—as a starting point for a series of installations, animations, and performative actions that weave together nonsensical narratives and embodied practices to interrogate the fluid relationships between material, form, and meaning.

The work unfolds through multiple iterations, each presenting an evolving ecosystem of objects and actions: pinch pots and coils become symbolic vessels, malleables, and horizontalists—characters in a speculative mythology. Animated stop-motion videos bring these forms to life, intertwining them with other objects from my studio: ramen noodles wiping out clay ensembles, budgies destroying Styrofoam glaciers, and molecular structures battling zebra-patterned bodysuits. These scenes evoke cycles of growth, destruction, and reconfiguration, underscoring the ephemeral nature of form and the instability of meaning.

Central to The Ancestry of Objects is the performative and improvisational approach to material. Clay, paper, wood, and other simple materials are manipulated, animated, and reassembled to create shifting narratives that resist resolution. The exhibition space becomes a site of continual disturbance—murals transform into boulders, decorative fans into forests, and tree branches into a geodesic cradle. Through these transformations, the materials perform their own lifecycles, enacting and embodying processes of decomposition and renewal.

The project’s conceptual underpinnings challenge the stratification of narratives and the authority of fixed meanings. The absurdity of the constructed stories, with their improbable protagonists and surreal events, destabilizes the internal voiceover that organizes and constrains perception. By dismantling familiar narratives and proposing new assemblages, The Ancestry of Objects seeks to unsettle the hierarchies and boundaries that define our culturally constructed realities.

This process-oriented approach reflects a broader inquiry into planetary issues and interconnectedness. As materials and objects dissolve, merge, and reemerge, they echo the fluidity and entanglement of systems that govern both natural and anthropogenic worlds. In this way, The Ancestry of Objects resists isolated, hierarchical constructs and proposes instead a material-semiotic narrative of interrelation, flux, and co-evolution. Through the continual reworking of materials, spaces, and stories, the project invites participants to consider the multiplicity of relations that define existence and to reimagine their place within these shifting assemblages.

Live/play/work studio in the Atlas Building, Jean Talon, Montréal

Installation for The Age of Catastrophe, Video Pool, Winnipeg, 2015

A concept of archive was expanded as that which expresses emergent growth and change through generative compositions in the installation The Temporary Archive of Ambiguous Architecture (2012–15), with four versions exhibited thus far. The project situated an interactive process for 3D-printed, fungi-spore-inoculated agar-agar compositions that would decompose or effect 3D printed PLA plastic vessels. The 3D printer is connected to a micro-controller that reads signals from a piezo microphone sensing vibrations or movements in the space. When people move around the installation, this mimics or alludes to mycelium networks sensing and responding-to activity in the earth. When the sensor is agitated, one part of a simple geometric shape is extruded from a syringe, which has been placed on a modified RepRap Prusa printer. The gel lines extruded onto agar-agar jelly shapes are filled with spores. The spores then grow their own forms or extensions dismantling organized space with the micro-environments printed by a mathematical apparatus. The 3D printer uses a simple programming language, G-Code, to direct the movements on an x, y, z Cartesian axis, where stereolithographic configurations of 3D objects are sliced into layers of two-dimensional coordinates stacked upon one another.

The Extraterrestrial Botanist is a pseudo-research project in experimental botany. This most recent body of this work focuses on quantum mind theories and alternative healing practices such as vibrations, subtle body, meditation and expanded consciousness. ET Botanist is about estranged relations with vegetal life and the impact certain practices in science and technology have in separating intuition and feeling from a plant-human dyad. This happens through modern systems of categorization, imaging techniques (microscopy), Cartesian figurations of human vs. nonhuman, and laboratory research techniques that remove plants from their habitats such as in tissue culture or hydroponics. The project is also about thinking of how one is affiliated with the earth, as in your earthly relations as an earthbound — are your feet in the soil or are you lost in space? In each of the installations of this project, I trace concepts and perform research in material practices as a way of thinking with these ideas and also incorporating lived experience through hand-ons experience with the techné in question.

Art Souterrain, Montréal, QC

In the work Automata for Colour, many forms of leakage are situated as a metaphor to allude to a poetics of transmission between phenomena in perpetual permeability and in an ongoing transfer of weird potentials. The word leakage connotes a movement or transfer, from within or among a perceived territory or boundary. It could be from a system composed of material forms or nonmaterial entities, as extraneous information, a carbon emissions leakage, data, energy or a transfer of objects. The term leakage is used in reference to a multitude of definitions in a range of activities, yet one consistent point is that the event of a leakage is almost always situated as a negative, a failure. It is conceptualized as a loss or negation of material, a site or an environment, money, energy, revenue, or signals. Can a reading of leakage be expanded to conceptualize an evocative transition? Can such an event be situated as a series of parameters and processes that open up to a range of interpretations of process composed of mediums, subjects, objects, thoughts, in the midst of a transitory state?

During the summer of 2013, Gatineau, Quebéc, residency at artist-run centre DAÏMÔN.

The video is divided into three parts where different field-work, or activities are illustrated. Each field-work brings together ecology, technical apparatus and a kind of cultural metaphor through the production of a particular entity.

curated by Wes Johnston, Dalhousie Art Gallery, Halifax, NS

A temporary installation/design studio to facilitate the generation of collaborative proposals by visitors to the site…. for concepts, artworks, actions, structures and other initiatives for the Halifax Common Roots Urban Farm (CRUF). The final structure was a semi-open kitchen (with a greenroof and patio) for the community farmers to appropriate as need arises.

Series of paintings, acrylic and ink on paper and mylar. Various dimensions from 24”-120”

Action Art Actuel, Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu, QC

Water is a conduit.

Residue is a memory.

Data is colour.

Cells act out as strange storage.

Les Territoires, Montréal, QC

The Temporary Archive is a series of experiments with rapid prototyping techniques and living fungi, part of the archive system (Archive 1, math & mycelium) uses a modified rep rap printer that is programmed to print with agar and mycelium spores when it senses vibrations in its immediate environment (as an analogy to fungi sensing behaviour in the earth). The printer prints the mycelium into pre-programmed math patterns as a starting point for the mycelium to then grow its own emergent micro-architectures from. Archive item 2, mapping-modelling-mapping, are a series of touchable 3d prints modelled from mycelium patterns, displayed on a light-table and Archive item 3 is a video that uses DIY 3D scanning and open source animation so ware to model and describe the artistic process involved in creating the archive.

Photo credits: Alison Reiko Loader

Residency and exhibition at Eastern Bloc, Montréal

This work poses the question: What is an archive? Is it alive? The project situated a somewhat interactive process for 3D-printed, fungi-spore-inoculated, agar-agar compositions, that would ideally, or “theoretically” decompose printed PLA plastic vessels (so far, they haven’t). The printer is connected to an Arduino micro-controller that reads signals from a piezo microphone sensing vibrations or movements in the ground. When beings move around the installation this mimics, or alludes to mycelium networks sensing and responding to various activity in the earth. When the sensor is agitated, one part of a simple geometric shape is extruded from the syringe that has been placed on a modified RepRep Prusa printer. The gel lines extruded onto agar agar jelly shapes are filled with spores. The spores can then grow their own forms, or extensions, dismantling organized space with the micro-environments printed by a mathematical apparatus. The 3D printer uses a simple programming language, G Code, to direct the movements on an x, y, and z cartesian axis, where stereolithographic configurations of 3D objects are “sliced” into layers of two dimensional coordinates stacked onto one another.

The assemblage of the mathematical apparatus and living spores in an aesthetic installation combines and layers habitual modes of “constructing” sensory space with another kind of temporal or quirky quality from the inclusion of an organic being illustrating rhizomal, or mycelial growth as an additional and unpredictable dimension. These hybrid forms of enacting with phenomena and the practices that form through these intersections are ongoing interventions in an aesthetic and performative approach in speculative ecologies. Causality becomes confused in these artworks as it is difficult to know what is happening and when, by whom, and even for what purpose? Most of the works have some kind of internal cycling process as well as the possibility for emergent growth and change.

The work combines digital and cellular reproduction to echo complex symbiotic relationships between creatures, environments and matter as a series of experiments.

There are three archive’s. Archive 1, Math and Mycelium, a modified Rep Rap 3D printer reconfigured to print with agar agar gel medium and mycelium spores when it senses vibrations in its immediate environment as an analogy to fungi sensing behaviour in the earth. The printer prints the mycelium into common shapes and patterns as a starting point for the mycelium to then grow its own emergent micro-architectures. Archive 2 is a series of 3D printed objects modelled from mycelium patterns, fractals, and geometric forms displayed on light-tables, in recent versions the 24” towers of 3D vessels have been filled with inoculated substrate to explore the possible material transitions that could occur, ideally fungi destroys plastic (they do topple them). Archive 3 Still….Life, is a video that uses DIY 3D scanning and open source animation software to model and describe the artistic process involved in creating the artwork.

This work is earth bound to some degree through a gesture of unraveling patterns of instrumentalization within traditions of measuring and visualizing earth through architecture, formulas, and x, y, z Cartesian axis planes. It interrupts these controlled mechanisms through engaging the printer through different vibrations — rudimentary, but suggestive of imagining difference or a possible semiotics through sensing and movement.

The work brings into focus qualities of mycelium that visitors may not have known or thought about. The idea of the installation further destroying itself through decomposition is another cue towards material remediation and agency. I want to explore the place between all of the entities that are brought together in these assemblages. What is a spore-agar-lighttable-Gcode-footstep like?

Whippersnapper Gallery, Toronto, ON

The event based art works continuously change form and are purposely unstable; flows and leakages; growth and decomposition; the materials and the structures are in perpetual conversation. The physical transitions within the art work are captured through various time-based mechanisms such as photographic time-lapse, ink residues, or evidence of biological growth that record traces or effects of one material actant onto another.

Text below by: Adrian DiLena, Whippersnapper, Toronto, 2012

Kelly Andres work presents the viewer with systems saturated with complexity - alive, organic and unstable, but also transparent and navigable. Her practice is centred around these explorations and inventively utilizes flora (and the micro ecosystems symbiotically existing alongside them), dyes, construction materials and electronic components to build and animate dynamic and ephemeral systems of growth, accumulation and decay.

As an object embarks on a trajectory it is acting within a system; within the parameters of a logical set of rules defined by discrete values. Systems can present an array of variables to the point of being incomprehensibly complex and irreproducible, or reduced to the point of a single switch; a single point of decision from which an observer can trace the arc of an active agent- logically and with accountability.

In time for Spring. Kelly Andres will be presenting Automata for Colour II at Whippersnapper Gallery. Similar to previous works exploring the parallels between biological systems and organic processes like transpiration (the means by which plants ‘sweat’ moisture from stems and leaves) to computing processes, Andres’ installation at Whippersnapper will feature a living array of tiger ferns, Ivies and other foliage embedded within a structural architecture that uses holding tanks, dyes and plumbing to house, feed and affect the visual appearance of the plants.

At the heart of the work is an intense and compelling fascination with the idea of data. Traditionally we think of data as the individuated components of a larger object. It is the sand that becomes the glass; a technical language beyond the comprehension of most but none the less crucial to our function. Andres, with a poetic and unabashedly raw use of material, has developed a means to process the enveloping data sets of our natural physical surroundings. In doing so, she asks how a methodological approach to data collection and analysis may inform the eclectic and experiential realities of our relationships with nature.

Andres’ works process the atmosphere, sunlight, chemical flows and nutrient bases by forcing them through mechanisms not unlike that of a computer - the piping is analogous to the logic gates of a processor, the flora accumulates the coloured water just as memory becomes becomes an ongoing document of operations in a computer. Each of these, as well as the number of other measurable dynamisms within each piece are constantly a product of the data streaming into the system as well as a reflection of the material constructions of each piece.

Inevitably the system that comprises Automata for Colour II will deteriorate over the duration of the exhibition. Andres’ work is intentionally ephemeral; decay and expiration are integral material states that contribute to the performativity of the work. The installation at Whippersnapper Gallery will feature a camera to periodically capture images of the flowers as they change colour, grow and eventually begin to wilt. The images, projected within the gallery will increasingly pose as a counterbalance to the dying foliage, presenting moments of the life cycle as the remaining structure becomes static and the biological activity ceases.

Andres’ work is innovative, inventive and thought provoking - situated at the confluence of material exploration and performance, while inspiring a sense of curiosity, play and wonder.

Consistently throughout Andres’ work one finds her striving to establish a framework capable of autonomously balancing active, lively and transformative processes with an honesty in its material uses and construction. It is within these precarious systems that the viewer is able to explore each movement and point of change, tracing the trajectory of the system’s activity and energies - to see both the simplicity and the complexity of these contained expanses.

Olfactory Map of populus, Wundergarden, 2011, Concordia University, Fluxmedia, Loyola Campus, Montréal, Canada.

Wundergarden was a semi-permanent outdoor installation for a series of curatorial projects directed towards research in art and the life sciences.

Project with Flux Media + Dr. Emma Despland Lab, designed/fabricated by jenna dawn mclewan, dj Claire Kenway (vernissage)

MARIN Residency around the Baltic sea, summer, 2011

Installation for Anniversary Party, Eastern Bloc, Montréal, QC

This installation was centered on performative fieldwork, where archiving and sampling presents a hybridization, a troubling of methods emerging from trajectories of thought such as eighteenth-century natural philosophy in the exploration of landscapes and classification of phenomena. The archives in the Plants and People Project were not named or organized in a linear or hierarchical fashion. Names for the samples collected were subjective and attributed to relations based on place. The wet-lab wasn’t really that sterile, and the equipment used was an eclectic assortment of glassware from a local thrift store. The PPP’s pedagogical activities included performative tours that documented the trajectories of plants and peoples from earthly locations to outer space in a speculative manner via collage using growing tissues, work with 3D printing, and chlorophyll as a communicative medium.

D.N.P Departement des Nuisance Publiques, Eastern Bloc, Montréal, QC

Flock employed a set of wearable cycling capes that display alternating light patterns permitting participants to follow along in the context of a multi-player synchronization game using soft circuits, small LEDs, and wearable micro-controllers. Each cape displayed a number of different circuits for participants to adhere to within a set time period (thirty minutes). The wearables simultaneously displayed one circuit pattern at a time, and did not organize the individuals or direct them to a specific position within the displayed configuration. This was the main challenge of the game: participants spontaneously develop a communicative system for navigating themselves as a group. The wearables also contained a sonar device, which created a proximity parameter. Each member of the flock had to stay within a certain distance of the others, thus using technology as a prosthetic to provide participants with the experience of a sonar-sense organ to navigate in a group, and mimicking creatures that use active electroreception or sonar in conjunction with their auditory system.

The work explored the variety of tactics that may emerge as individuals attempted to stay within the parameters of the game. The game delves into the areas of gesture-based communication and impromptu decision making. How quickly can participants adapt, and can they become fluid in their movements within the specified parameters or circuits? Flock valorized intuition, group dynamics, and improvisation above repetition and rehearsal. Another element of the project was the aesthetics and poetics of movement, specifically as choreographed movement.

Here the work was influenced by flocks of birds and the V formations that are understood to increase the efficiency of long-distance migration for large birds, such as geese and swans, and for masses or swarms of birds, such as sparrows and swallows. Synchronized swarms are a protection and proliferation strategy for mass feeding and discouraging predators. In relation to bicycles, to swarm or to ride as a flock of cyclists can feel empowering. To ride with a group is exciting, dynamic, and very much a loosely choreographed activity. Even to watch groups of riders together is spatially poetic. From a critical mass, to trios of night riders, this activity is fluid and dynamic, and the rushing wind and self-induced acceleration frees one from the ground and gravitational hardness of the body and of walking.

Culinary Cultures of the Kinder/Garden” Latitude 53, Visualeyez, Edmonton, AB

Culinary Cultures of the Kinder/Garden, a collaborative work with Alison Reiko Loader for Visualeyez Performance Art Festival at Latitude 53, in Edmonton in 2010. During the exhibition, improvised performative works unfolded casually each day with various living and edible beings, or phenomena often referred to as living cultures.

Agar-Agar Architecture, 2010, a living sculpture environment, an abstract architecture in agar medium, a semi-solid gelatine made from adding dehydrated seaweed to boiled water and nutrient such as sugar.

The prototype for this project/concept was produced during Fluxmedia’s BioreMEDIAtion workshop that was lead by Tagny Duff, Dr. Jennifer Willet, David Khang, Dr. Justin Powlowski and Stelarc in October 2010 at Concordia University, Montreal. Collaboration with Alison Reiko Loader

Animated Landscapes, DIY Citizenship, Art Gallery University of Toronto, Toronto, ON
Collaboration with Saoirse Higgins

The Animated Landscapes project seeks ways to understand the delicate balances in rural and urban settings through designing and building sensory instruments and systems within an artistic framework of critical playfulness. AnimatedLandscapes is an attempt to open up the field of the natural sciences to activated individuals who are curious about local habitats. To facilitate new relationships to the landscape we bring together design, art, technology (electronic and analogue) with collaborative discussion to design DIY instruments that can sense, measure and communicate relevant data that is unique to each physical site and collective inquiry.

Studio, Montreal, installation tests

The work is influenced by artistic practices that think about systems and process-based art works such as Hans Haacke condensation cube, Rhine-Water Purification Plant and with more recent explorations in eco-aesthetics and “engineering” by artists. The term automata is used critically, I do not want this installation to be automatic but more lively, merged with a practice of expanded “painting” colour in air with lines, drawing, clear vinyl tubing act as vessels that reference fluidity and bodies. The installation are meant to be a kind of being, a slough-like “neuro-semi-hub” expressing emergent behaviour whether the pumps and motors are either/both on or off. It is a distributed system that attempts to balance the flows and amounts of content of each tank through multiple timers, drip gauges, lights, and the amount of evaporation that varies each day.

Residency, Kuenstlerdorf Schoppingen Foundation, Germany

These works were conceptualized as performative sculptural habitats to think about cycles and flows. Colour and water circulated through gravity flow and an injection system - the dye (food colouring) enter the flora, are sucked up through the stems in a process called transpiration and then leak over into a series of catch basins. Through a faulty filtering process, the colour is (somewhat) removed from the water to then cycle through the system again - the entire “hue” of the habitat becomes increasingly muddy.

For Visualeyz - Performing with Edibles edition, 2010. With Alison Reiko Loader.

Doughbie evolved as a series of adoptable living bread doughs displayed on plinths that came with wearable fabric slings. Visitors could adopt a doughbie by naming it and leaving the name tag on the empty plinth. The adopter would put on the sling and carry the doughbie with them throughout the day allowing the yeast-beings to rise and fall through the body heat of the ‘parent’. In the evening doughbie could be divided, one portion baked, and one used to start a new doughbie the following day. Each adopter had their own experience after this point. Some individuals came back and discussed their time as a dough parent, one adopter shared the baked loaf the next day. Apparently riding in public transit with a live dough is somewhat uncomfortable given the distinctly potent yeasty odour it emits.

In the first part of my experiences with many different plants, in regards to making a place for sensing, movement, choreographies, observation and time-space I established a “set” where I could continuously be present in a changing surround of growth. Setting up a space in a greenhouse (the set) where these organisms can grow and be observed by cameras and direct observation provided an experience in adaptation and initiated a state of becoming more perceptive of another organisms needs and temporality. Plants are sensitive to their surroundings, and we exist together at a sort of virtual intersection. To some extent, I would like to drift closer to their world, the slowness, the circular, a direct relation with exterior stimuli such as sun, nutrient and rest. These complex elements make up a human’s daily life cycle but are often invisible or taken for granted - not resting when it is necessary, consuming and wasting natural materials. I enter into and out of out of the greenhouse set and the plants are always changing, always growing and in comparison, my growth seems less visible. Perhaps my hair is longer, or I trim my fingernails, but I am not spiraling towards the sky a foot a week like the vines, or stretching my roots to the earth inches per day like the squash - or am I?

I do not perceive plants as passive, fixed or stable. I know they are always moving and my perception has changed, has been altered - not only through observing plants temporally through the time-lapse but also by learning to perceive minute details of movement, exceedingly gradual and subtle alterations. Am I seeing double? Am I capable of observing vegetal-being? What are the potential applications of learning to alter ones preconceived perceptual state?

These are slow motion photographic test images with conductive thread and surface mount LEDs. Disco for Darwin is a reinterpretation of Charles and Sir Francis Darwin's lesser known work “The Power of Movement in Plants” from 1880. Plants are always moving in a circular direction, a spiraling from the moment the cotyledon emerges from the seed. This movement was studied in depth by Darwin (and others) in the late nineteenth century through a series of analogue motion-tracking tools meant to analyze the movement and behaviors of various plant species. The physical movements of plants, for the most part, exists in a different time-space, one that is difficult to witness during regular human observation-time. To see the circumnutations of plants one must set up a technical apparatus to record their growth over long periods of human-time. The artwork consists of an installation of an analogue drawing technique that Darwin used (consists of glass plates, a small bead fixed to the plant and ink) to trace the growth of seedlings and the movement of plants prior to photographic time-laspse. I will replace the bead with a tiny LED light and use both digital time-lapse and ink-on glass plate mark-making. The plant movement drawings and video will be transformed into vinyl or stencil dance step-diagrams to be enlarged and placed on the floor. A library of related music (for plants and people) is collected for each site.

will accompany the installation.

Lilipod, Neighbourhood Science, Medialab-Prado, Madrid, Spain

ISEA 2008, National Museum Singapore

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Finally, We Hear One Another (2007), is an audio exchange device for two people. The exchange devices are disguised as wearable garments, consisting of small speakers to be worn near the ear and a series of microphones to capture the sounds around each of the individuals’ bodies via bluetooth and mobile phones. In the exhibition the participants will be able to choose from different head or neck garment styles in which the audio exchange device will be located. The device uses wireless technology allowing the two participants to hear the sound from each other’s immediate environment while mobile and in physically differing locations.

This subtle exchange of sonic signifiers allows participants to develop a relationship to another environment, a remote social reality and a locative immersion. To investigate another space through the interface of a mobile individual removes the prescriptive function from the communication technology that often mediates the relationship between bodies, space and technologies. This project is exploring the ability of media to create new meaning and location through sensory cues, yet it also dismantles the controlling nature of such technologies as they only serve as a channel for the participant to gain a sense of environment and subjective experience through experiential cues.

Gallery 809, MST 4 Performance Art Festival, Calgary, AB

The Urban Habitat Lab is a self-sufficient and sustainable mobile lab for communicating with a living, local environment. With her mobile laboratory, Andres incorporates the green consumer practices of prefab design, conservation, sustainability, and human-powered energy, while providing a format for individuals to interact with the natural habitat of a city. In a modified bicycle-turned-laboratory, the artist roams the neighborhood in order to disseminate overlooked and invisible information within the natural environment.

MST Ride On!, Calgary

Songbike, (2006-2009), is a mobile sound lab than collects urban soundscape, individual and collective narratives.

The collected audio pieces are available from a website and can also be broadcast from a moving bicycle or speaker (and/or set up near the outside of the gallery or other building) into the community. The website serves as a hub or visual map of the community; connecting the physicality of the rides to the oral narratives and soundscapes collected throughout the duration of the residency. Each day of the exhibition, Songbike ventures into the community seeking diverse individuals to talk to about their community and to provide a number of perspectives on the development within the city, memories of places that once existed, people that have come and gone, or anything that someone wants to share. Songbike also seeks invitations from individuals for guided tours of the community and will solicit various representatives from the community to ride and talk. Songbike connects individuals through their shared interest in community and aurality, self-produced content and piracy, connectivity and interaction.

The Songbike concept was developed as a do-it-yourself (DIY), get out of the gallery artwork with the intention of sharing and rediscovering the soundscapes within communities. This project merges many topics: hi/low tech, recycling, community, street performance, art and sustainability. Songbike intends to bridge the physical and the virtual, allowing individuals to connect the physical community to an online or virtual community.

This project was conceived at the Interactive Screen 0.6 residency at the Banff New Media Institute in August 2006, and was awarded an additional co-production for development (which in the end was unavailable due to resources and scheduling conflicts). In April 2007, a version of the project was conducted at Signal and Noise Festival in Vancouver where the focus was on urban soundscape. I also took the piece to CONFLUX 2007 in Brooklyn, NY where I recorded sound and streamed moving video and audio to the website. I would like to develop another version of this project that is much more about interaction and collecting community narratives through constructing a visual and auditory mapping of a community and the changes it is experiencing. Instead of collecting primarily ambient soundscape, I want to engage in conversations with pedestrians, spontaneously and invitational. I would like to create a multidimensional document of how rapid urban development is perceived by the individuals who live and work in various communities.

Lademoen Kunstnerverksteder, Trondheim-Norway