Following an exciting week in residency at DG ENV working on Natura 2000 sites in Ireland with Lucía Iglesias Blanco, complete with a presentation to stakeholders at the Art and History Museum in Brussels which stirred up enthusiasm across the board including from DG ENV Director General Florika Fink-Hooijer, artists Sam Nester (Instagram: @1snester) and Marina Wainer (Instagram: @marina_wainer) will continue their residency period this week at the JRC in Seville (06/03 to 10/03). For this part of their project Synocene - beyond the Anthropocene, they will be working with JRC colleague Isabelle Hupont Torres and the HUMAINT team on aspects relating to artificial intelligence and how it might represent nature.
Synocene is a spatial sound installation that explores a decentralised view of our anthropocentric experience of the natural world. This work engages local communities, the beings inside Natura 2000 forests, and the contributions of artificial intelligence. |  |
Today they will kick off the week with a “Co-creating with AI workshop”, together with techno-creative agency Estado Latente, the Science and Art department of Seville University, JRC colleagues from the HUMAINT and PANACEA teams and JRC communications representatives. This workshop is closed to invited participants.
The week will nonetheless give plenty of chances for colleagues in Sevilla to get to know Sam and Marina and their practices, most excitedly through a presentation/ artistic performance of their ongoing work on Thursday 09/03. The presentation will be hybrid in format - in person attendance in Seville and Webex participation will be possible, details to be confirmed. To receive the details please email: JRC-RESONANCES@ec.europa.eu.
More about the project
The final outcome will exist as an immersive 360° spatial sound installation for public audiences. Visitors to this work will discover the many narratives created by the human experiences of nature in a hybrid writing with AI, along with forest field recordings from within the Natura 2000 site. To achieve the final installation, a community of people will be invited to encounter their local forest in a transformed state. From this experience, they will work with artificial intelligence to co-create narratives that investigate a post-anthropocentric view of nature. These audio recorded narratives will be paired with site-specific nature field recordings in a generative sound installation to create an ever-evolving attempt at a human/non-human/more-than-human impression of the natural world.
Background
Sam Nester is an Australian born, New York City based musician. Nester aims to bring the environment from the background into the foreground at a critical time for environmental awareness. Marina Wainer is a Paris-based artist. She develops a transdisciplinary practice at the crossroads of creation, research and innovation.Lucía Iglesias Blanco is a forestry engineer and a nature protection expert, at DG ENV. The three of them met at the SciArt Summer School on NaturArchy which took place in June 2022 at the JRC in Ispra. The group is also working with Isabelle Hupont Torres (AI, affective computing and human-machine interaction researcher), for the aspects on artificial intelligence.
Details
- Publication date