FAUNA-X

Fauna-X is an experimental, multimedia artwork that explores the use of fairy tale as an alchemical process of creative transformation, and the role of art as a medium for raising awareness within our community about climate change. Using an interactive video installation that responds to the sounds of the environment, we invite the audience on an audiovisual walk through an imagined forest, interweaving music, story-telling, visual art, aroma-turgy (ambient smell) and dance into a total, immersive artwork. 

 

Set in a mythical Celtic grove, one metaphorically ventures deep into the woods, the landscape of the subconscious. Guided by a female creatura, Fauna-X, we encounter other-worldly flora and fauna that symbolically represent innermost fears, desires and memories; a forestial illusion of the human psyche. The setting draws attention to the interconnectedness of the human and natural worlds and evokes the Jungian concept of a nekyia, or night-journey, a path of transformation. It is a work about the human condition, our struggle to find meaning and connection within a disrupted, foreboding environment. It also raises questions about co-inhabitance and creativity within a surrounding ecosystem, one that involves both physical and digital realms. 

 

An integral part of this work is an investigation into the role of technology in art. We will implement Michaela Catranis’ award-winning research in the field of audiovisual art and AI to experiment with the relationship between the artist and the machine. How does the artist respond to digital realities? How does technology help us transcend limitations of physical artworks and what kind of art would that look like, the human and machine, not as polarities but as synergetic, co-evolving? Since its original conception, Catranis’ research in the field of audiovisual art has continued to receive exceptional response and support from both her audiences and artistic institutions, Contemporary Arts Alliance-Berlin, Ensemble Modern Cresc. Biennale u.a. 

 

Another important aspect of this work is the format. Using this concept of a “walking concert”, the audience enters a mythological forest and physically walks through the performance. They are guided on this journey with the help of a dancer, whose role is not only as artistic interpreter of the sound world within, but functions additionally as both gate-keeper and custodian of the group, leading the way along this forest path, from one installation/stage to the next. This format reinforces the main intention of the work, as a transformative process. It emphasizes the narrative, a myth that symbolically represents self-reflection, of wandering into the subconscious. 

 

Additionally, the format of this production reflects on the ecological aspect of our work. How does our art affect the environment, what is our role in our surrounding ecosystem? Ecologically-sensitive poetics is a poetry/art form concerned with the vulnerability of the natural world. As a practice, it refers to something that involves, but does not weaken or exploit the surrounding ecological environment. As the audience experiences an audiovisual walk through our forest imagery, they experience sonic effects that simulate forestial sounds which the visuals interact to in real-time, as well as the sounds of the space itself, including the audience. It is this interaction and the ambient smell of the forest, which invites the audience into a space that magnifies the awareness and appreciation of our surroundings. At the heart of this is the idea of the tree as a life-force, a source of the air we breathe, the materials that we live from, sustaining our own existence.