ARTWORKS

Miranda Bellamy and Amanda Fauteux
A Wardian Case, 2021 - 2024.
4-channel augmented reality video installation (13:38 minutes), kauri, rimu.

A Wardian Case introduces the flora of Kawau Island, home to Sir George Grey from 1862 to 1888. Grey’s shadow remains through the exotic plants and animals he introduced in pursuit of imperial prestige and prosperity. In quiet collaboration with the plants that endure, plant cell signals are sonified in chorus and cacophony. In hearing them, Kawau Island’s botanical transformation is traced and Grey’s legacy is unsettled.

B.E. Phillips, Moving and listening in relation to trees and 'A Wardian Case', 2021.

Miranda Bellamy and Amanda Fauteux are partners and artistic collaborators who share time living in Ōtepoti, Aotearoa and within the traditional territory of Mi’kma’ki known as Sackville, New Brunswick, Canada. Their collaborative practice identifies and extends the stories of plants through site-specific research and experimentation. By listening to plants and responding through interdisciplinary projects, they make space for the critical revision of human and particularly settler-colonial histories and to reflect on material accountability, reciprocity, and ways of seeing. They are the 2024 Frances Hodgkins Fellows at the University of Otago.

Simon Endres (Ngāpuhi)
First-person (hard-boiled), 2024.
Sculpture

These are sketches using mostly cheap easily found or purchased objects and materials. Stuff that’s all pretty familiar to most of us. They have their own history and meaning. Underneath their dress are simply shaped frames made from radiata pine (an exotic timber introduced here from California in the 1850s primarily for shelter belts and woodlots. It is now the dominant tree species in Aotearoa). They have welded steel feet so they don’t fall over. The frames lean forward to give them a sense of direction and a more convincing centre of gravity.
I always imagined they would coalesce into some kind of mana-enhancing procession like Shona Rapira-Davies’ Nga Morehu, or Bill Hammonds bird-people looking out towards the horizon in an achingly melancholic way, maybe Rodin’s Burghers of Calais at a push. But they’ve ended up looking and feeling more like a menagerie of anxious misfits. Real-life avatars that wobble with the push and pull of competing emotional states and semantic codes, alongside clichés, feints, a certain repulsiveness – and few one-liners. Characters and characteristics have emerged over time from a mix of political intent, playful improvisation, material curiosity, and a need for comic relief to cut through their darker side. If asked to describe what they are, I would call them hard-boiled cartoons.

Simon Endres (Ngāpuhi) is an artist based in Tāmaki Makaurau. A graduate of Ilam School of Fine Arts, Endres’ work has featured in solo and group shows in Aotearoa starting in the early 90s. After 21 years in New York he returned to reestablish his practice in Aotearoa. Endres’ wry post-pop objects draw from an interest in identity politics, clichés of masculinity, social stratification, and race. His material enquiries and playful considerations of semiotic meanings and formal relationships play out between and across objects and visual languages. These characteristics are brought to life through art disciplines including photography, drawing, installation, audio, and sculpture. His art practice continues to reflect on what it means to be a citizen during these turbulent times from the viewpoint of a global Pacific.

Kat Lang
P2Polyphony, 2024.
Live AV installation.
Commissioned by The chronicle of < _______ >

Kat Lang’s practice indulges a socially relational realm, using the memetic recontextualisation of physical and cultural material to talk through social space. They have taken this idea through gallery and club spaces, with the intent to nurture experiential connection within their practice, progressing their interest in parasocial and commercial exchange in the realm of intimacy. In particular regard to Artificial Intelligence, they are primarily concerned with its role within, and the proximity this has to AI as a service that doesn’t ask for money. Rather, it asks for data, intimate knowledge and insight as if to replicate the human emotional experience.
In an attempt to amplify an earnest search for intimacy, touch, and connection, Lang privileges sensory immersion and participation, and pulls at the threads of meaning, its failures, and emotional appendages.
Lang utilises the naturally hauntological and disembodied voice of AI, trained on the voices of pop stars who have long given words and melody to our most basic need for love and affection - synthesised into instruments to be triggered only once body is present, tracked, and collected.

Kat Lang is an artist, DJ, and promoter currently based in Te Whanganui-a-tara. In their practice Lang constructs with an intent to pull at the threads of failure, meaning/meaninglessness, the sensory and its emotional appendages, and the harvesting of sentimental data. Lang has primarily extended beyond the gallery environment, engaging club and gig space as a real-time engagement of bodies, atomised personal stardom, and time-bound materiality. In a gallery context, Lang has focused on amputating space, privileging immersive, interactive and auto-destructive art, as opposed to stand-alone object.

Shannon Novak
What would our children look like?, 2023.
Epsom premium photo lustre print, 472 × 900 mm.

A collaborative work between writer Jeffrey Buchanan and Shannon Novak. Buchanan and Novak were both raised in Taranaki during different periods, both endured intolerance and homophobia during their respective periods, and both explore that history in their respective work. The left portrait is of Buchanan as a child during the 1960’s and the right portrait is of Novak as a child during the 1980’s. The middle portrait was created using an AI image generator merging both portraits into a hybrid portrait or a potential view of Buchanan and Novak’s child if same-sex reproduction were possible.
As we rapidly enter a phase in artificial intelligence development where AI-developed moving image is becoming more accessible at the consumer level, and more indistinguishable from non-AI developed footage, it won’t be long until we can see our “child” in motion, growing up, a documented life as though they did and/or do exist. This could then be applied to robotics, a 3D physical realisation of a “child robot” that is rebuilt or replaced over the years inline with the growth of the human body over time. Perhaps, even further into the future, we will use AI in combination with augmented reality through a brain computer interface. We could see and interact with our child as if they were real, and watch our child grow into an adult in real time as we age.
Whatever happens, we must critically and thoroughly analyse the technology at each step. Evaluate, challenge, question, explore, but ultimately keep the wellbeing of queer communities at the heart of all decision making.

Shannon Novak is an artist, curator, and activist based in Tāmaki Makaurau. He seeks to dismantle heteronormative structures and systems and build spaces that acknowledge, celebrate, and support diversity and inclusion in sexual orientation, romantic orientation, gender identity, gender expression, and sex characteristics (SROGIESC+). This manifests as socially engaged and collaborative painting, photography, installation, sculpture, and curatorial practice that may extend beyond traditional exhibition spaces. His ongoing project, Velebit, aims to grow safety in relationships between LGBTQI+ communities and emerging technologies.

Erica Sklenars
Do you believe?, 2024.
Interactive web-based artwork.
Creative coder - Will Sklenars.
Commissioned by The chronicle of < _______ >

Do you believe? uses a web browser add-on to search for images by responding to the sound of a hand clap. With each clap, an image with animated wings appears and floats around a screen for a few seconds before fading away. The more claps, the more appear, resulting in a screen full of fluttering images. When the clapping stops, they all disappear.
Interested in the nature of socially constructed reality where value is maintained by collective belief, such as crypto currency, and currency in general, Erica Sklenars was reminded of the Peter Pan film of her childhood, where a fairy would die every time someone said they didn’t believe in them. In one scene, when a fading Tinker Bell is dying after drinking poisoned medicine, Peter breaks the fourth wall imploring the viewer to clap their hands if they believe in fairies to save her.

Erica Sklenars is an artist and designer based in Te Whanganui-a-tara. Working across the fields of mixed reality, video art, installation, performance and intervention, her practice is often collaborative, and explores modes of communication between people and social groups, pop culture, underground cultures, as well as DIY adaptation or hacking of technology. Often using humor, Sklenars’ work subverts and contentedly inhabits personal human failures, and plays with future dystopian themes evident in current day life. Sklenars is currently a PhD candidate, Massey University College of Creative Arts, researching questions related to perception within extended reality technologies.

That Subliminal AI

That Subliminal AI is configured on the Generative Pre-trained Transformer 2 (GPT-2), an open source Artificial Intelligence developed by OpenAI. That Subliminal AI’s fine-tuning texts are an excerpt from The Kafka Chronicles by Mark Amerika; Julian Jonker’s Voodoo Economics: A Remix from the South, and a Requiem for Uncounted Ancestors, a review of Paul D. Miller’s Rhythm Science; and The Art of Noises by Luigi Russolo.