Baroque Bodies (Sway)

Laura Splan

Artwork Description:

“Baroque Bodies (Sway)” is an immersive encounter with epigenetic entanglement across micro and macro scales. The installation incorporates a 3D gaming environment, data-driven sound, and AI images controlled by intuitive movements and emergent social interactions. “Sway” engages audiences with interconnectedness, complexity, and predictability through a sensory experience that is seemingly simple and accessible. Signifiers of the 'natural' world in AI-generated landscapes invite embodied explorations molecular bodies within a liminal space that is at once biological and technological. As visitors are compelled to inspect landscapes reflected on 3D protein surfaces, their movements throughout the installation manipulate the camera's perspective on molecular models. Each entry into the space triggers an additional sound element that is added to an accumulating soundscape that persists in the space after visitor exits. Participants hold equal “sway” over the camera’s movement leaving each to decide what the nature of their control will be: playful, collaborative, competitive, etc. The work positions emerging epigenetics research as a conceptual underpinning through which to explore our posthuman relationship to the natural world while repurposing the technologies with which we imagine it. Created in partnership with scientists and technologists, rules for the interaction explore power and influence as they relate to game theory and epigenetics research related to pesticide exposure, trauma, somatic memory, and gene expression. “Sway” asks: What’s at stake when notions of “nature” and “nurture” are upended? What does it mean that the sensory experiences of those that came before us, affect our own immediate experiences of the world?

Project Collaborators:

Technology Collaborators: EY Intelligent Realities Lab, Danielle McPhatter (Lead Creative Technologist), Steven Dalton, Joseph Bradascio, Domhnaill Hernon Science Collaborators: Hannah Lui Park Adam Lamson Project Supporters: Commissioned by the Beall Center for Art + Technology Black Box Projects for Getty PST, a Getty Museum initiative. Additional Support Provided by EY Metaverse Lab Artist Residency at NEW INC and Onassis ONX. This work was also made possible by the Simons Foundation.