Echoes from the Future
Echoes From the Future was an interactive virtual exhibition curated by Tina Sauerlaender for the MacKenzie Art Gallery that ran from 29 June until 27 September 2023. Click below to visit the exhibition archive.
About
Echoes from the Future: Speculative Creatures & Post-Human Botanicals
Disruptive human activity threatens the Earth’s ecological balance, eradicating biodiversity and shared resources. Echoes from the Future, curated by Tina Sauerlaender (peer to space), highlights artists working across diverse media to preserve nature, reveal environmental devastation, and speculate on future life forms. The virtual exhibition features work by artists Aviv Benn (ISR/UK), Laura Colmenares Guerra (COL/BE), Reiner Maria Matysik (DE), Sarah Oh-Mock (DE), Bianca Shonee Arroyo-Kreimes (CAN), Sabrina Ratté (CAN), and Tamiko Thiel (US/DE). In rendering current environmental issues visible within a virtual reality landscape, Echoes from the Future immerses audiences in alternative post-anthropocentric futures and speculative ecologies.
Tina Sauerlaender (she/her) is the co-founder and co-director of the exhibition platform and international collective of independent curators, peer to space (since 2010). She has been curating and organizing large-scale group exhibitions like Resonant Realities (Exhibition of the VR ART PRIZE by DKB in Cooperation with CAA Berlin, Haus am Lützowplatz, Berlin, 2021), The Unframed World. Virtual Reality as Artistic Medium for the 21st Century (HEK Basel, 2017), or initiated and co-curated SPECULATIVE CULTURES. A Virtual Reality Art Exhibition (Kellen Gallery, Parsons/The New School, New York, 2019). She focuses on the impact of the digital and the internet on individual environments and society, on virtual reality in visual arts, and on exhibition making in virtual realms. She is also the artistic director of the VR ART PRIZE by DKB in Cooperation with CAA Berlin.
She is co-founder & CEO of Radiance VR (since 2017), an international online platform and research database for virtual reality experiences in visual arts that includes the Radiance VR App for VR Art for Meta Quest headsets.
She holds a PhD from The University of Arts, Linz, Austria. The title of her dissertation is PERFORMING IDENTITIES. Self-Representation in Art from the Renaissance to Virtual Worlds. In conjunction with her PhD she curated the online exhibition performingidentities.net.
She is a lecturer for Digital Art History at the University of Applied Sciences in Bielefeld, Germany. She gave talks on Virtual Reality & Art at re:publica (Berlin), ZKM (Karlsruhe), New Inc (New York), Kunsthalle (Munich), University of Applied Arts (Vienna), Digifest (Toronto), Technical University (Prague) or Roehrs & Boetsch (Zurich).
She is the founder of the SALOON Berlin, the initial branch of the SALOON Network, an international network for women working in art.
Echoes From the Future is part of a series of digital exhibitions created through the MacKenzie Art Gallery’s Digital Exhibitions Toolkit and Art Installation Launcher (DETAIL)—a newly developed resource championing the development of art exhibitions for digital platforms.
DETAIL provides institutions, curators, and artists with tools to help facilitate the production of interactive digital art exhibitions. DETAIL incorporate solutions for mobile and desktop access to artworks created in virtual reality, augmented reality, exhibitions for video game consoles, in-person interactive experiences, and online browser-based exhibitions. The MacKenzie Art Gallery is hosting three digital exhibitions built with DETAIL between 2023-24 to demonstrate the toolkit’s capabilities. Funded by the Canada Council for the Art’s Digital Strategy Fund, DETAIL will be publicly launched in late 2024.
DETAIL is developed by Cat Bluemke and Jonathan Carroll, Digital Exhibitions Consultants at the MacKenzie Art Gallery.
Last Species On Earth, 2022
three-channel video, 4:00 minutes, 3D models, and 3D animated graphics within a spatial installation
Courtesy of the artist
In the Last Species On Earth installation, we enter a habitat that preserves the last surviving plant and animal origin specimens in incubation chambers. There, we meet octopus-like beings, rhizomatic and bioluminescent organisms; further, speculative creatures we encounter on giant screens surround us. The videos reveal that we may have entered this world through an organic touchscreen interface, where spaces seem to nest into each other and blur the exact place we are at. Are we immersed in the same world that we watch on its surface? Are we like zoo visitors, or are we, in fact, a part of this world? Towards the end, the video zooms out, and the device switches off; we remain, however, in a place that turns out to be a pregnant belly of an alien-like human. The touch screen is reminiscent of the “pods” from David Cronenberg’s science-fiction thriller eXistenZ (1999): fleshy, biotech virtual reality game controller linked via “umbycord” to a “bio-port” at the base of a player’s spine, connecting to their nervous system. Here, the boundaries between the digital and physical worlds blur, where we seem to be intrinsically “plugged in.” This theme was eerily prescient in other science fiction films like The Matrix (1999) or Inception (2010) but now seems prevalent in our increasing biopolitics life.
Bianca Shonee Arroyo-Kreimes is a Montreal-based Costa Rican-Canadian digital media artist. Growing up on the edge of a rainforest nourishes her creative practice as her work strives to resurrect the meaning of nature’s place in her own life now as both an urbanite and multidisciplinary artist. Within the virtual worlds she creates, 3D embodiments of organisms borrow shapes, colours, and stories from plants and animals within our own world, while remaining singular. This conscious decision is intended to inspire a newly discovered appreciation of the endangered, non-human world that humanity often takes for granted as her portrayals seek to embody humankind’s seemingly objective and narrow misunderstanding of nature in this time of ecological crisis.
Untitled series, 2023
high-resolution images installed as a site-specific spatial installation
Courtesy of the artist
Grotesque beings and big-eyed creatures staring out from the undergrowth inhabit the visual universe of Aviv Benn’s paintings. They are mysterious, charming, absurd, and uncanny. Colourful plant thickets span the picture surface in dazzling hues. Surreal and dream-like, Benn’s depiction of a speculative nature speaks directly to our psyche on an emotional meta-level, even though humans are absent. Are they already extinct, or have they never existed? Or are the creatures we encounter shadows of them who have finally become one with nature instead of destroying it? Benn understands painting as an act of compulsion with its ritualistic repetition of images, motifs, and ornaments over numerous canvases, informing a narrative that stretches beyond the boundaries of a singular artwork. This notion resonates in its virtual installation, as it allows us to forgo the physical dimensions of the canvas and disregard gravity, becoming more akin to the creatures in her work. The images float in space in large sizes: they are at an angle, intersect and overlap. Together, they form an immersive installation in which we do not encounter the pictures face to face but can step into the artist’s cosmos.
Details:
- Aviv Benn, And Who Knows If the Flowers in My Mind, 2023, Oil and spray paint on canvas, 76 x 76 cm (30×30 inches)
- Aviv Benn, Each Other Through the Endless Years, 2023, Oil and spray paint on canvas, 127 x 127 cm (50×50 inches)
- Aviv Benn, For All the Fire That Blazed So Dark For Us, 2023, Oil and spray paint on canvas, 127 x 127 cm (50×50 inches)
- Aviv Benn, I Give To You These Verses, 2023, Oil and spray paint on canvas, 122 x 122 cm (48×48 inches)
- Aviv Benn, Nothing Adorns the Walls of This Sad Shrine, 2023, Oil and spray paint on canvas, 86 x 86 cm (34×34 inches)
- Aviv Benn, Sometimes You Are Like the Horizons, 2023, Oil and spray paint on canvas, 96 x 112 cm (38×44 inches)
- Aviv Benn, Stream of Your Tears Ends in My Anxious Heart, 2023, Oil and spray paint on canvas, 127 x 127 cm (50×50 inches)
- Aviv Benn, The Sun Does Not Put Out Their Mystic Blaze, 2023, Oil, spray paint and oil pastels on canvas, 122 x 122 cm
- Aviv Benn, These Orbs in Which Spark Is Never Seen, 2023, Oil on canvas, 86 x 86 cm (34×34 inches)
Aviv Benn’s paintings are a visual universe starring symbolic archetypes that pop up and reappear time and again, and together formulate the dreamlike world they inhabit. These colorful figures take over the entire painterly space, encompassing their surroundings, dissolving and merging, floating in an unknown limbo. Benn views painting as an act of compulsion and a ritualistic repetition of images, motifs, and ornaments. Repeating the same imagery over numerous canvases, informs a narrative that stretches beyond the boundaries of a singular artwork; new relationships are woven together to build a vivid myth throughout her work.
Ríos Trilogy, Chapter N. 3 R€¥€R$€ (REVERSE), 2023
Supported by Flanders State of the Art and the Digital Arts Commission of the Wallonia-Brussels Federation
Additional Credits
Conception, Direction, Production, CG and VFX supervisor
Laura Colmenares Guerra
Unreal environment and lighting
Samson Michel
GIS implementation
Gabriel Codreanu
Sound Design & Music composition
Loup Mormont
Amazon sound field recordings
Jana Irmert
English VO
Emma Dingwall
Co-Producer
OHME
Laura Colmenares Guerra and Jana Irmert
Ecdysis, 2023
Audiovisual animation, 8:00 minutes
Courtesy of the artists
Additional Credits
3D Animation
Laura Colmenares Guerra
Field Recordings and Composition
Jana Irmert
The Colombian artist Laura Colmenares Guerra has embarked on a 5-year-long artistic research project on the Amazon rainforest, which she has just completed with the RÍOS TRILOGY. In the virtual exhibition space, we encounter a large, interactive 3D model of the Amazon, delineated by the hydrological sub-basins established by its primary tributaries. The user can interact with the entire map by selecting Indigenous territories, natural protected areas, and environmental threats: oil, mining, hydroelectric power plants, roads, fires, and deforestation. From a Western perspective, the artist asks how we can relate and connect to the multifaceted Amazon region: it is Earth’s largest rainforest and essential for the planet’s ecological balance. Yet the Amazon Basin is marked by colonization, destruction, and exploitation of natural resources and Indigenous Peoples. How can we change perspectives and immerse ourselves in the complex region to truly understand it? RÍOS TRILOGY reflects on the late capitalist era, in which we expose our planet to the interests of global corporations, where states are powerless or unwilling to act in the interests of people and nature. The work is an urgent call for awareness and preservation of environmental protection and Indigenous rights.
Further information:
- RÍOS Trilogy: https://ulara.org/selected-work/rios-trilogy
- RÍOS I: https://ulara.org/selected-work/rios-chapter-n1
- RÍOS II: https://ulara.org/selected-work/rios-chapter-n2
- RÍOS III: https://ulara.org/selected-work/rios-chapter-n3
- Ecdysis (Video): https://ulara.org/selected-work/ecdysis
- RAISG-Credits: https://ulara.org/selected-work/raisg-credits
Laura Colmenares Guerra is a Colombian artist based in Brussels. She has a transversal research-based practice that implies long-term processes of creation. Her work explores the impairment between contemporary western societies and the living ecosystems, the environment and the inhabitants of the planet. This questioning drives her to conceive settings that relate to the politics of landscape and the notions of territory. She explores the constructions of the concepts of nature and natural and language as a foundation medium for reality.
Beings (series), 2017
3D-scanned data
Courtesy of the artist
- 00028 pulcheria sensitiva https://reinermatysik.de/arbeitwork/sculpture-plastik/being-wesen/pulcheria-sensitiva/
- 00032 impatiens soporus https://reinermatysik.de/arbeitwork/sculpture-plastik/being-wesen/impatiens-soporus/
- 00047 sucius lepideus https://reinermatysik.de/arbeitwork/sculpture-plastik/being-wesen/sucius-lepideus/
- 00049 ferox depilatus https://reinermatysik.de/arbeitwork/sculpture-plastik/being-wesen/ferox-depilatus/
- 00069 dione valida https://reinermatysik.de/arbeitwork/sculpture-plastik/being-wesen/dione-valida/
- 00073 ossa concubinatum https://reinermatysik.de/arbeitwork/sculpture-plastik/being-wesen/ossa-concubinatum/
- 00084 sonitus pollentes
- 00100 tentorium alcyoneum
In his series, Beings, the German artist Reiner Maria Matysik brings an entire ecosystem to life — more than 300 alternate creatures for a posthuman future. In the virtual show, they are not exhibited in a museum’s white cube but embedded in another speculative nature: a landscape which nevertheless cannot meet the requirements of the respective habitats of the life forms. A complex narrative accompanies each of the artist’s organisms. Their poetic and descriptive names give clues to their characteristics and properties. Most exhibited organisms live above ground, like “pulcheria sensitiva” (dearest sensitive one). Others, like “dione valida” (firm, healthy mother of Venus), usually live underground in subterrestrial ecosystems. “Sonitus pollentes” (loud roaring) prefers the seawater in the wide swamp belt, the tropics. Numerous mouth-like organs cover the surface of its body, crowned with grasping tools to suck prey. “Impatiens soporus” (impatient bringer of sleep) is characterized by high resistance to diseases. In its body, single groups of cells grow into new individuals subcutaneously. “Pulcheria sensitiva” occurs in several sexes and reproduces polysexually. It feeds on inorganic matter, like “ferox depilatus” (depilated, strongly embattled one), which is only bisexual and survives without oxygen. The categorization and classification of species is a complex field that claims to create life on earth for a time after humans, even though humans and their research and experiments in natural science, genetics and molecular biology still influence it.
The artist Reiner Maria Matysik builds bridges between scientific research and artistic activity. He asks about the possibilities and consequences of evolution as well as human influence on it. His “bionts” are based on Matysik’s assumption that humans will and should actively intervene in evolutionary events. The unbelievable speed of development in genetic engineering and molecular biology already suggests that the future will require completely new thought processes. Here, above all, the human claim to dominance is at stake.
PHASO Project
Postaerocene, 2022
drawing
Airplane Skeleton, 2022
3D model
Shell PHASO, 2022
3D model
Plastic/Animal (Fish), 2022
Image
Courtesy of the artist
Sarah Oh-Mock’s interdisciplinary Posthuman Archaeological Studies Organisation (PHASO) project offers a hypothetical perspective of future life on Earth. Its first development, in cooperation with archaeologists and paleontologists, led to the eco-fictitious creation of an association of scientists of a future intelligent species on earth in an undefined epoch in the distant future, with different archaeological research interests. In one chapter, the artist explores the so-called age of aviation, which she named the Aerocene. PHASO archaeologists believe that living organic bodies gradually grew together with inorganic or technical elements. It all started during the Age of Plastic, when living organisms began to ingest and integrate plastic — an apparent reference to our present time.
Further, the shell from that epoch, connected by a cable covered with plastic and metal, is a half-organic and half-inorganic life form. In the following Aerocene, its inhabitants even more, consisted of half-organic and half-inorganic life forms. The excavated skeleton of the airplane is a remnant of this era. The accompanying drawing is a reconstruction based on the bone finds. The giant globe shows where the airplane skeletons are, revealing where the most air traffic occurred (white areas). It shows the reconstructed movement routes of the Aerocene. In the artist’s speculative imagination, life on Earth moves toward a world with organic-bionic life forms, in which nature and technology have become one before disappearing just like humankind before them.
Further information (Catalogues):
- Sarah Oh-Mock. PHASO. Futur III, Kunstverein Buchholz (ed.), 2022.
- Sarah Mock. PHASO. Was von uns bleibt, Mainz, 2016.
Sarah Oh-Mock’s surrealist video works, installations, objects, photographs, and drawings address the relationships of culture, artificiality of urban places, nature and the unconscious. Her works have been shown at numerous exhibitions and festivals in Germany and abroad, for example the Torrance Art Museum Los Angeles, the Musée Boribana in Dakar, Senegal, in the Bundeskunsthalle Bonn, Dokfest Kassel, Athens Video Art Festival, Haus der Kulturen der Welt Berlin, Art Space One, Seoul. Sarah Oh-Mock has been awarded numerous prizes and grants, including a scholarship from the German Artists’ Association.
Floralia, 2021
digital environment
Courtesy of the artist/ELLEPHANT
Inspired by the writings of Donna J. Haraway, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Greg Egan, Sabrina Ratté’s Floralia plunges us into a speculative future, where individual samples of then-extinct plant species are preserved and displayed in the vitrines of an archive room. When users approach the spatial installation, their surroundings darken to illuminate the vitrines, emphasizing the vegetation. Within the exhibition architecture, a new space is created in which we can immerse ourselves entirely into the artist’s installation. Through her use of editing and other visual strategies, heritage plants unite elements from the past and present and, at the same time, point to possible future life and preservation. The title Floralia also refers to the ancient Roman festivals honouring Flora, the goddess of spring and fertility. She symbolizes the constant change in nature, an everchanging cycle that facilitates blossoming again and again in new forms. In the context of this work, Floralia exceeds the typical turn of the seasons and points to a larger context of nature, extinction, digital representation and conservation. Floralia becomes a simulation of ecosystems born from the fusion of technology and organic matter, where past and future coexist in a perpetual tension of the present.
Additional Credits
Music
Sabrina Ratté
Sound design
Andrea-Jane Cornell
Sabrina Ratté’s practice focuses on the multiple manifestations of the digital image: analog video, 3D animation, photography, printing, sculpture, virtual reality and installation. The constant integration of new techniques allows her to explore the themes that run through her work in ever-changing forms: the influence of architecture and the digital environment on our perception of the world, the relationship we have with the virtual aspect of existence, the fusion between technology and the organic world. Her works are situated halfway between abstraction and figurative, landscape and architecture, and on the thin line that separates the real from the virtual.
What You Sow, 2023
interactive installation
Can you imagine a world where plastic is grown from planted seeds? In the interactive work What You Sow, users are sunk into a burbling underwater scene with plastic garbage — flip flops, bottles, cutlery — drifting down from the sky. If they tap the falling garbage, plastic waste corals grow out of the “seeds” and surround the user with trash, similar to how our human activity covers ocean denizens with plastic refuse. With their symbiosis of plastic items and the behaviour of natural plants, the artists Tamiko Thiel and /p visualize an absurd idea which is not so far-fetched. The title of their work refers to the Biblical proverb, “You Reap What You Sow,” indicating that consequences always follow actions. Who, then, sows plastic and will therefore reap plastic? The artists point out how plastic determines our natural ecosystem: floating in the ocean as sediment, ingested by the animals and organisms that live there, and eventually, humans. This downward spiral, in which more and more plastic gets into the ecosystem, can hardly be stopped because the invention of plastic is an essential pillar of our society’s so-called “evolved” prosperity. Think about when you use plastic in your everyday life and how you might want to replace it with other materials, such as naturally renewable raw materials. Could you, as a consumer, do that? Once again, it is instead the global capitalist industry that is driving the development, and that could stop its progression.
Tamiko Thiel was awarded the 2018 SAT Montreal Visionary Pioneer Award for over 35 years of politically and socially critical media artworks exploring place, space, the body and cultural identity, evoking layers of memory, history, myth, fantasy and desire to give visual form to these invisible levels of meaning. Artworks in museum collections include AI supercomputers in MoMA NY and the Smithsonian Institution, a VR artwork in the San Jose Museum of Art and AR artworks in the Whitney Museum NY and the Kunstsammlung Roche Basel, plus 2D and 3D print works in private collections.
/p is a German media artist and software developer working on web based projects and VR since 1994 and collaborating on AR and VR artworks with Tamiko Thiel since 2018.
Essay
Echoes from the Future: Speculative Creatures & Post-Human Botanicals
Written by Tina Sauerlaender
Edited by Rea McNamara
Disruptive human activity continues to destroy the Earth’s ecological balance, eradicating biodiversity and our planet’s shared resources. The virtual reality exhibition Echoes from the Future: Speculative Creatures & Post-Human Botanicals highlights artists working across diverse media to preserve endangered landscapes, reveal environmental devastation, and speculate on alternate future life forms. The visitors can explore their works together in an immersive landscape setting, a world of its own. The exhibition aims at revealing the complex, multifaceted interplay of nature, culture, technology, history and speculation to offer new perspectives on human existence amidst other entities.
The artworks are embedded in a sparse landscape of rolling hills. It is reminiscent of Bliss, the default wallpaper of Windows XP from 2001 on, a picture taken by Charles O’Rear in 1996, who claims that it has never been altered in any way, although the colours appear unnaturally saturated. Compared to Bliss, the landscape of the exhibition is rather pale and withered; it could be either seen as a more realistic or more dystopian version of this landscape. The juxtaposition points to the inseparable entanglement of physical impression and artificial digital imagery of nature. The embedded artworks and installations resonate with this interplay.
The exhibition title resonates with the interconnectedness of the present, the future and the past. Our deeds of the past, as well as our assumptions of the future, influence our actions in the here and now. Unfortunately, with our knowledge it still seems impossible to prevent the Earth’s ecosystem as we know it from breaking down. In the 3D sculpture series RÍOS, Laura Colmenares Guerra researches the deforestation of the Amazon Rainforest related to its commercial use. She proposes a series of speculative animated sculptures based on Amazonia-related data to render the human impact visible. In her interactive work What You Sow by Tamiko Thiel and /p, users sow seeds in a bubbling underwater world that grow into corals made of blue plastic bottles or red plastic forks. She alludes to the increasing plastic pollution in the world’s oceans and the contamination of all living creatures. Both of the works, with their preoccupation with the exploitation of finite resources, attest to how our lives are too much based on a capitalistic global production that separates manufacturing from the place of consumption.
Humanity’s distance from nature and its reconciliation forms an essential theme of the literary genre of eco-fiction that deals with speculative, fictional perspectives on nature and its entanglement with humans. In contrast to the lost connectedness of the two organisms, eco-fiction often includes a plea for a new symbiotic-empathic understanding of nature. It proposes a perspective, shared by many of the exhibition’s artists, that moves humans out of the centre towards the viewpoint of the environment. In her video, Last Species on Earth, Bianca Shonee Arroyo-Kreimes alludes to extinction and the domestication of nature by humans in an imagined reality where a hothouse biotope nurtures the last remaining plants and animals. In the installation, Floralia, Sabrina Ratté speculates on future forms of preservation of then-extinct plants. Her virtual biotope combines digital forms of organic matter and technological interventions to simulate an ecosystem that refers to the past, present and future. Together, these works re-assert how the interconnectedness of past, present, and tomorrow exist when humans are de-centred.
Indeed, digital technologies open the possibility of implementing post-anthropocentric ideas and creating speculative scenarios in immersive spaces. In Aviv Benn‘s paintings, viewers encounter a dreamlike and enigmatic nature consisting of grotesque creatures and botanical themes in luminous yet unnatural colours. Her exuberant universe appears immersive and, at the same time, alienating, symbolizing the tension between humankind and nature. Meanwhile, in his series of 3D sculptures, Beings, Reiner Maria Matysik creates a cosmos of speculative creatures and organisms with almost scientific-like descriptions of the species and their natural habitat while they inhabit the virtual world.
The symbiosis of new technologies and nature conveys an artificiality of nature which often seems strange and alienating. One reason is that we keep forgetting that the nature surrounding us is anything but natural or pristine; it is human-made. Germany’s surface consists of one-third forest, which is 99% shaped by humans (National Geographic article, 2022). In fact, humans shape 75-95% of the earth’s surface (PNAS article, 2021). Our actions threaten the survival of countless species and the functionality of the whole terrestrial ecosystem. With PHASO Project, Sarah Oh-Mock explores remnants of future life forms on Earth from a fictional, post-anthropocentric perspective, creating excavated skeletons of an airplane-bird hybrid or ancient clam shells fused to batteries. With their idiosyncracies and absurdities, these hybrids are the ever-living after-life of seemingly disposable capitalistic waste.
The exhibition’s works engage critically, playfully, and humoristically in current issues, combining them with speculative ecologies. Echoes from the Future: Speculative Creatures & Post-Human Botanicals invites visitors to grapple with their relationship to nature, particularly when it comes to its digital artificiality. What are the viewpoints the artists convey? Could their speculations and new technologies — particularly virtual worlds in which we can fully immerse ourselves — lead to more awareness and an ecological consciousness? Can they offer new approaches to solutions? Both the exhibition design and the artworks refrain from precise positioning. They are an invitation to reflect on our complex and multifaceted relationship with our environment on a personal, societal, and global level. Following mostly speculative and post-anthropocentric approaches, their works shift our perspectives from a human-centred angle towards alternate entities and scenarios for our planet.
Ernest Callenbach, Ecotopia (Berkeley: Banyan Tree Books/ Heyday Books, 1975, 2004)
Jim Dwyer, Where the Wild Books Are: A Field Guide to Ecofiction (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2010)
Suad Garayeva-Maleki and Heike Munder (editors), Potential Worlds. Ruins of Today and Eco-fictions of Tomorrow, exhibition catalog (Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zurich, and Yarat Contemporary Art Space, Azerbaijan, 2020)
Amitav Ghosh, The Hungry Tide (New York: HarperCollins, 2005)
Ursula K. Le Guin, “Vaster than Empires and More Slow,” in New Dimensions 1 (New York: Doubleday Books, 1971), 87-121
Donna Haraway, The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness, Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003)
Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner, Leora Kava, Craig Santos Perez and Craig Santos Perez (editors), Indigenous Pacific Islander Eco-Literatures (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2022)
Elizabeth Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History (New York: Doubleday Books, 2014)
Premee Mohamed, The Annual Migration of Clouds (Toronto: ECW Press, 2021)
Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands and Bruce Erickson (editors), Queer Ecologies: Sex, Nature, Politics, Desire (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010)
Timothy Morton, Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007)
Ursula Ströbele, “Augmented Species: Digitale Ökofiktionen als Strategie künstlerischen Engagements”, in: Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 86, 2023, H. 2, S. 253-27
Instructions
Please note that this is an archival webpage and contains information that may be out of date.
Launching the exhibition
Download the exhibition at this link (https://spekwork.itch.io/echoes-from-the-future). Choose the correct download option depending on your platform, there are different options for Windows, Mac, and Oculus headsets.
Launching the exhibition on a Mac
Download the file echoes-from-the-future-MACINTOSH.zip from the Downloads page (https://spekwork.itch.io/echoes-from-the-future). It is recommended you have 1.5 GB of available space on your harddrive. The exhibition requires a stable internet connection of minimum 15Mbps, with 30Mbps recommended. Unzip the file by double-clicking on the download. Click the extracted file (ECHOES-osx.app) to launch the exhibition.
Once the exhibition launches, you will be prompted to enable access to your microphone. Allow access. On the opening screen, select the enter button. A loading bar will appear. Once the exhibition has loaded you will join the exhibition server, and the words “Joining Gallery” will be displayed.
Instructions will appear onscreen once you have connected to the Exhibition server. These instructions detail how to navigate the virtual space:
- Use arrow keys or WASD keys to move around
- Rotate your view using your mouse or trackpad
- Unlock your cursor using the Escape key
- Bring up more Information and menu options by pressing the I key or by selecting the bottom right button after unlocking your cursor.
- By default all audience members are sharing their microphone audio. To change this, use the Audio options in the Information menu (I) or use the buttons on the top right of the screen after unlocking your cursor.
Launching the exhibition on Windows
Download the file echoes-from-the-future-WINDOWS.zip from the Downloads page (https://spekwork.itch.io/echoes-from-the-future). It is recommended you have 1.5 GB of available space on your harddrive. The exhibition requires a stable internet connection of minimum 15Mbps, with 30Mbps recommended. Unzip the file by double-clicking on the download. Click the extracted file (ECHOES-win.exe) to launch the exhibition.
Once the exhibition launches, you will be prompted to enable access to your microphone. Allow access. On the opening screen, select the enter button. A loading bar will appear. Once the exhibition has loaded you will join the exhibition server, and the words “Joining Gallery” will be displayed.
Instructions will appear onscreen once you have connected to the Exhibition server. These instructions detail how to navigate the virtual space:
- Use arrow keys or WASD keys to move around
- Rotate your view using your mouse or trackpad
- Unlock your cursor using the Escape key
- Bring up more Information and menu options by pressing the I key or by selecting the bottom right button after unlocking your cursor.
- By default all audience members are sharing their microphone audio. To change this, use the Audio options in the Information menu (I) or use the buttons on the top right of the screen after unlocking your cursor.
Launching the exhibition on Meta VR headsets
For Meta Rift S
Download the file echoes-from-the-future-WINDOWS.zip from the Downloads page (https://spekwork.itch.io/echoes-from-the-future). It is recommended you have 1.5 GB of available space on your harddrive.
Meta Quest 2
On your computer, download the file echoes-from-the-future-QUEST.zip from the Downloads page (https://spekwork.itch.io/echoes-from-the-future). It is recommended you have 1.5 GB of available space on your headset. Unzip the file by double-clicking on the download. Open the extracted folder, you will have the file ECHOES-android.apk.
Ensure that your Quest 2 has Developer mode enabled. Developer mode can be enabled by logging on to the Meta mobile application, selecting your paired Headset and going into Headset Settings. Once in Headset settings, you can turn on Developer mode.
Return to your computer and open your internet browser. Go to https://sidequestvr.com/ and select “Get Sidequest.” Select the Advanced Installer option. On the same page as the application download are corresponding guides to your current operating system – the computer you are using to download and transfer the files to your headset (Mac or Windows). Follow the installation guide that corresponds to your operating system.
Turn on your headset and connect it to your computer with the USB C to USB C cable that came with the headset. If you have an external battery pack currently plugged into your headset’s USB C port, remove it temporarily and replace with the USB C cable connected to your computer. Launch the SideQuest application. The software should indicate with a green light in the top left window corner that your Quest is connected. If this is red or orange, place your Quest on your head and use your controller to allow the connected device to access files and other permissions requests.
Ensure the SideQuest application’s window is not fullscreen. Bring up the file folder containing the ECHOES-quest.apk file and click and drag it onto the open SideQuest application window. Navigate to the task manager section of the application (on the application’s top menu icons select the icon fourth from last, it will appear either as three lines with a checkmark or as a number when it is actively loading the application) to check the status of the upload. When ECHOES-quest.apk is installed the title will appear green.
Place your headset on yourself. Launch your library and navigate to the top right corner, click that button and scroll down to “Unknown Sources.” Launch Echoes from the Future by selecting it from this page.
Please note that this is an archival webpage and contains information that may be out of date.
Desktop:
Navigate the exhibition in first-person perspective. Use the arrow keys or WASD keys on your keyboard to move around. Rotate your view using your mouse or trackpad. Your cursor will automatically lock to the screen, press the “Escape” key to unlock your cursor and select the Information menu options.
You are sharing the multi-user exhibition with other audience members. Allow access when prompted for your microphone. You can control audio and voice sharing through the Information menu options.
The Information menu can be toggled by pressing the “I” key or by selecting it with an unlocked cursor. You can access these instructions again through the Information menu at any time.
VR:
Navigate the exhibition in first-person perspective using the thumb stick on your right-hand controller to move around. Rotate your view by moving your head or using the thumb stick on your left-hand controller.
You are sharing the multi-user exhibition with other audience members. Allow access when prompted for your microphone. You can control audio and voice sharing through the Information menu options.
Launch this menu by selecting the button on the bottom right, or by toggling the audio buttons on the top right. Audio and voice sharing is on by default.
You can access these instructions again through the Information menu at any time.
Please note that this is an archival webpage and contains information that may be out of date.
Bianca Shonee Arroyo-Kreimes, Last Species on Earth
Enter the large dome by moving your avatar inside. Once inside the dome, videos will automatically play. Ensure your computer audio is turned on to experience the artwork fully.
Aviv Benn, untitled series
Use your avatar to navigate around Aviv Benn’s painting series. You can ‘fly’ your avatar by rotating your view towards the sky and moving forward.
Laura Colmenares Guerra, Ríos Trilogy, Chapter N. 3 R€¥€R$€ (REVERSE)
Approach the map and buttons will appear next to it. Select the buttons (rotate view and click on desktop, index finger trigger with the VR headset experience) to highlight corresponding areas of the map.
Two videos will automatically play next to the map. Ensure your computer audio is turned on to experience the artwork fully.
Reiner Maria Matysik, Beings
Use your avatar to navigate the Beings. You can ‘fly’ your avatar by rotating your view towards the sky and moving forward.
Sarah Oh-Mock, Posthuman Archaeological Studies Organisation
Use your avatar to navigate around the objects and drawings.
Sabrina Ratté, Floralia
There are four animations with accompanying audio. Ensure your computer audio is turned on to experience the artwork fully.
Tamiko Thiel and /p, What You Sow
Enter the semi-transparent dome. Select the plastic objects inside (rotate view and click on desktop, index finger trigger with the VR headset experience) to grow a garden of plastic.
The words “Joining Gallery” remain onscreen.
Check your internet connection. Exit the exhibition and restart the application when you have a secure signal.