Particulate Matter x Midge Swarm
Dolleen Tisawii’ashii Manning, Jorge De Oliveira, Christina Dovolis, Luka Kaplowsky, and Mary Bunch.
Particulate Matter x Midge Swarm is an interactive dual-channel projection responding to the environmental crisis in Sarnia’s Chemical Valley—home to Canada’s worst air quality. The project reflects on the harm caused by petrochemical industries, particularly to the Aamjiwnaang and Walpole Island First Nations. In Particulate Matter, viewers control a digital smog screen with a throttle controller, revealing a surreal industrial landscape, while triggering sirens, local voices, and media clips. Midge Swarm, in contrast, immerses viewers in a vibrant wetland. Spectators can clear the swarm of midges by waving their arms, and perform a wetland soundscape on a midi board. Installed in proximity, this installation asks audiences to dwell in sites of remedy and complicity in the spoils of capitalist extraction.
Remote Sensibility VIII VR: Inner Reality
By Marten Berkman
On an interactive journey in Virtual Reality, artists weave the worlds we create, with the world we come from.
Does modernity create a veil over our ancient relationship with all life?
Can we lift this veil by deepening our perspective?
Our Elders share profound perspectives through time.
Our astronauts share humbled perspectives from space.
Are these essential medicine for our hubris?
And our artists share perspectives from profound sensibilities,
inner realities reaching out to weave the world we create,
with the rest of life where we belong.
Does our inner reality hold ancestral memories from ten thousand generations?
Come inside, touch the orbs, take the journeys… where the separation between inner and outer realities… dissolve.
Marten Berkman
and a circle of collaborators