The eighth national touring exhibition ‘Experimenta Life Forms: International Triennial of Media Art’ 2021-2023 opens at Plimsoll Gallery, Hobart on 19 March where it will be on view until 9 May before heading north to Newcastle’s The LockUp from 15 September followed by seven more gallery destinations around Australia until May 2023.
‘Experimenta Life Forms’ brings national and international emerging and established artists together from diverse fields of practice presenting a dynamic showcase of robotic, bio-art, screen-based, installation, participatory and generative works, concerned with technological and biological adaptations of the changing world we live. Curated by Jonathon Parsons and Lubi Thomas with Associate Curator Jessica Clark.
Suzanne Kite and Devin Ronneberg, Itówapi Čík’ala (Little Picture), 2019, immersive installation, song, power, sound, processors, machine learning decisions, handmade circuitry, gold, silver, copper, aluminum, silicon, fiberglass, adjustable. Courtesy the artists and Experimenta, Melbourne
The sentient qualities of plants and animals come to view in the immersive installation Pulse: The Life Force of Trees
(2020) by PluginHuman (Dr Betty Sargeant and Justin Dwyer), and a series of works by First Nation’s artists from
Australia, Aotearoa (NZ) and the USA, are provocation to understand the importance of connection to land and Country. ‘Indigenous ontologies already exist to understand forms of ‘being’ which are outside of humanity,’ writes Kite whose collaborative work with Ronneberg invites audiences to interact with a non-human entity with their interactive
work Itówapi Čík’ala (Little Picture) (2019).
Artists: Daniel Boyd, Oron Catts & Ionat Zurr, Brad Darkson, Michael Candy, Donna Davis, Justine Emard, Anton Hasell, Floris Kaayk, Kite & Devin Ronneberg, Thomas Marcusson, M0wson&MOwson, Uyen Nguyen, Max Piantoni & Matthew Riley, PluginHUMAN, Helen Pynor, Dominic Redfern, Theresa Schubert, Rebecca Selleck, Agat Sharma, Miranda Smitheram, and Laura Woodward.
