(this Page is available to Lobe only.) If your eyes could zoom...(working title)
Installation Mock up (in progress, completion fall 2025).
This video is a rough sketch showing the possible behaviour of the cloud in relation to the text phrases.
It does not have the particles converging in this preliminary iteration. It shows one direction of the immersive
installation only.
I have been experimenting with filming light on water as a possibility to visualize the clouds, but want to expand
what might ultimately give them form. I have also been acquiring skill in a new special effects software VFX Particles
to develop the shape and characteristics of the particles. This software will also allow me to conjoin them and their
behaviour with that of the clouds.
As installations go, the entire piece would loop for the entirety of venue hours. The duration of the loop is to be
determined as the work and positioning of the phrases and their analogous visual activities develop.
Sound Aspects
While I record and mix my own sound for both installations and music projects, and have recently been exploring the
spatial sound software Dear Reality, I am eager to develop my acumen at Lobe.
In the Video Sketch above, I have temped in sound as a sound sketch for the clouds. It is a rough mix from two
sources: of a recording from a bee hive and sound recorded as Voyageur passed Jupiter.
Integration of elements into an immersive field. (Last phase, installation).
My plan is to create one channel with sound that would cycle through all phrases, sound and moving image.
This channel would then be staggered amongst other channels, so that when facing north for instance one might
experience the work at the start to their left the work part way through, behind them at a different point and
so on (through the use of multiple projectors), so that any direction the visitor look in will have a different
point in the cycle. So for the Lobe residency in the final phase, we would gang up the channels in the round and
then play to create sound variations between them and get the mix to a delightful fruition.
As installations go, when installed in a gallery, the entire piece would loop for the entirety of venue hours, in
the case of a possible installation at Lobe, it could run as an installation for a time to be determined. The duration
of the loop is to be determined as the work and positioning of the phrases and their analogous visual activities develop.
This is a new enveloping sound, light, and text installation in progress. This Video shows only the current text selection
and the background atmospheric video, and it's background sound, not the converging particle layer, nor it's omni directional
sound array.
If Your Eyes Could Zoom continues my practice (since the mid 1990s of creating omnidirectional projected works that offer visual
and textual alternatives to outmoded (ancient) western narratives and human-centric classifications of existence.
(past specifically immersive works include
on 5.972×10^24 kg (call/response)(2025),
(5.972×10^24 kg is the mass of Earth) SlipHost(2007),here and here:SlipHost).
I am seeking support for the creation of a new interdisciplinary work that coalesces sound, text and immersive moving image.
If Your Eyes Could Zoom, will extend my practice both in form, and subject content: it will coalesce narrative threads that
have run though my works over years. I have considerable experience creating bespoke enveloping environments (see technical below).
Over the past months, I have been writing short descriptive phrases (in progress) that describe the relationships between phenomena.
These phrases successively cover things of vastly different properties, and on vastly different scales (spanning microscopic , bodily,
through galactic), while other phrases describe emotive responses or experience. I plan to integrate these to appear in a random order,
they will ultimately become subtitles describing what will occur in front of the viewer.
I imagine If Your Eyes Could Zoom as a continuous enveloping array of seamlessly converging and intermingling layers of undulating,
atmospheric globular "clouds" that have seemingly conjoined soft, orb-shaped particles.
A surround soundscape will accompany the particles' behaviours. I imagine a subtle layers that individually reference the visual aspect
of the amorphous 'clouds' and the soft-edged particles.
They will all move in concert with each other and in response to the successive identifying phrases appearing as floating subtitles
(with positioning around the room to be determined as the work develops). Each phrase would insist, through their duration of presence,
that the surrounding visual field is representing them. Yet, the visual twist of logic is that the physical characteristics (phenotypes)
of the particles will remain fairly consistent throughout, varying only in speed and intermingling behaviour, as the wildly disparate
phrases unfold.
These phrases will vary between describing believable instances of particles converging such as "tide and sand", for instance, and more
abstract or emotive propositions, such as "cortisol and feeling". Additional phrases will emerge as I work.
This project extends from a lifelong interest in physics, nature and resistance to reductiveness.
Through If Your Eyes Could Zoom, will hopefully suggest that all matter, whether on a grand or tiny scale, (as reconciled by the phrases),
is part of an array of intermolecular beings and operations, and that on a subatomic scale, there is structurally no separation between us
and everything else in existence. Drawing on these relationships reflects my ongoing desire to undermine enduring Apex species constructions,
prejudice, and violence by offering a gentler, alternative subjectivity to inform contemporary culture.
I don't want to simply reflect the world through my work, I want to offer possibilities. My Ouvre
In 1995, before continuous visual surround systems were available to artists, I innovated and fabricated my own image systems and projectors
through experimentation and continue to do so. My subjects/worlds did not suit rectilinear framing, nor does If Your Eyes Could Zoom.
The dispensing of framing (literal and metaphorical) is integral to the reception of the work. My strategy for this approach is to provide
an experience that encourages the visitor's shifting attention, giving them agency to apprehend meaning amongst a field of possibilities.
This hopefully encourages curiosity and offers respite from the enduring legacy of Western human-centricity (its narratives and classifications
that domesticate human subjectivities and organize false hierarchies of existence).
some phrases to date:
tide and sand
*
warm breath and cold air
*
eyes and light
*
heliosphere and space
*
soil and root
*
thought and music
*
colliding galaxies
*
cortisol and feeling
*
Gulf Stream and shelf break
*
cell wall and virus
*
hug
*
lichen and stone
*
milt and eggs
*
hot springs and archaea
*
synapse and electricity
*
eyes and light
*
eyes meeting
*
thoughts meeting
*
flanking Universes
*
table top and dust
*
pulse and oxygen
*
Clouds
*
music and thought
*
skin and atmosphere
*
Ink and paper
*
Ions and intestinal wall
*
Helium and glass
*
kinesin walking with ATP
*
lovers
*
Geosmin and rainfall
*
heat and tongue
*
Damascenone and romance
*
picoplanktons
*
You and everything
*
touch and feel
*
possibility and action
*
Iron and oxygen
*
fear and love
*
thought and Hz
*
Nature and narratives
*
your dogs breath and yours
*
food and saliva
*
truth and lies
*
the air between you
*
unknowns and event horizon
_____________________________
(...to be continued) FIONA BOWIE BIOGRAPHY
Fiona Bowie (we/they/us- a nod to multispēçiality) , b. K'emk'emeláy̓ (Vancouver).
Fiona is an interdisciplinary artist, musician/songwriter, and live and work on the stolen, unceded, ancestral and current territories
of the əəθkʷə̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵw̱wú7mesh Úxwumixw (Squamish), and sə̓lil̓wətaʔɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations. with acknowledgement
and support for their and all indigenous aeons-long nationhood, cultures, & all their relations.
Fiona variously employs photography, film, video, text, and sound to create immersive gallery installations, evolving public artworks and
web-based projects. Fiona's narrative and documentary approaches offer structural and spatial alternatives to ubiquitous and enduring
linear hierarchical narratives. Fiona has frequently designed, fabricated and assembled 360 degree/omni-directional projectors to
defy historical rectilinear framing habits of commercially available technology and innovated system design to relay temporal shifts
in her evolving public artworks. Gallery installations such as Swell(1995) and Faltering Repetition were created before immersive
systems were available for use by artists (at that time, the domain of Planetariums). Her lightweight, diminutive 360° or omni-directional
projectors produce immersive spaces while employing as little material as possible to realize them. Due to these work's individualized
mechanisms and optics, their dimensions are variable, fitting into various dimensions of space in which they may be installed.
Writing, archiving practice, and web-based interactive public participation portals such as Put Words in Our Mouths are strategies
Fiona employs to increase public access to her work and visibility of the subjects therein.
Fiona has also acted as a curator, and from 2014 to 2021 facilitated collaborations, projects, and research by artists, writers, and
curators at her Órbitas studio/residency in Costa Rica.
The subject content of her work is motivated by compassion and lifelong interests in physics and nature.
Fiona identifies as a multispēçial intermolecular being to normalize that, on a subatomic scale, there is structurally no
separation between us and everything else in existence. Respecting that all beings experience existence in their own way,
Fiona's works centre on interconnectivity and social equity with others and other life forms.
This work is being produced in K'emk'emeláỷ (colonially known as
Vancouver BC.),
on the stolen, unceded territories of the əəθkʷə̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵw̱wú7mesh Úxwumixw (Squamish),
and sə̓lil̓wətaʔɬ
(Tsleil-Waututh) Nations, with respect and acknowledgement of their aeons-long nationhood, cultures, knowledge, languages and all relations.
We support ongoing actions and initiatives here and in the unceded Wet'suwet'ens Yintah.
All images, sound and text are the exclusive copyright of the artist and may not be used or duplicated without
the expressed permission of the artist.
