TransLife International Triennial of New Media Art 2011

JND is a sensory environment for one person at a time lying in total darkness. The installation is based on Gustav Fechner’s concept of the Just Noticeable Difference: the ability to perceptually detect the smallest changes in sensory stimuli. Combining near darkness with extraordinary low levels of vibration, light and sound, visitors enter the pitch dark black box and lie down on a raised, body length surface. Once inside, visitors experience a “composition of touch, light and sound”; an extraordinarily wide range of visual, auditory and tactile sensations that challenge how we perceive the smallest degrees of change in sensory stimuli over different levels of intensities.

This intricate web of turning lights and darks operates cyclically, as does the iron installation. Lights appear and disappear with the rotation of the wheels, and the number of the wheels-twelve-references both the hours of the clock and the months of the year. Sand pours down the bottles as though they were hourglasses. But if the windmills suggest human patterns of time, they also allude to perpetual motion machines and thus a different scale of measurement if not a state beyond temporality. Although actually run by electricity, the form of the assemblages, with the running sand acting as weights, evokes the overbalanced perpetual motion wheels (dating to the middle ages, by Bhaskara, Villard de Honnecourt, and others) that were designed, futilely, to rely on inertia to spin forever. On earth perpetual motion seems to be an impossible fantasy, though in space planets and stars spin for unfathomable spans of time without energy input. The tension between human time and eternity is thus condensed into these enigmatic wheels, as is that between human and cosmic scales: the viewer oscillates between recognizing the hand-held water bottle and seeing star systems in their arrangement.

In a number of earlier works, Landry has called attention to the threat to our most precious resource: clean water, which is conspicuously absent from the bottles here. Filled with sand, the bottles are dried up, sterile. In Quebec water is intimately linked to the question of energy, and thus the perpetual motion problem and fantasy. There are 237 bottles here, the liquid contents of which would apparently fill a bath-no more. The short-sightedness of human management of natural resources is made pitifully obvious by the work's evocation of cosmic time, in comparison with which the human lifespan and even the existence of the species seem simply irrelevant. And there is something terrifying about this assemblage, which is so cold and serene, so unperturbed by the viewer's presence.

(Excerpt from DVD catalogue « Diane Landry, installations & performances 2008-2009 », text by Alison Syme, L'Œil de Poisson, 2010, p.4-5.)
 

The Plant(iPod) Installation explores the active relationship between objects in the space of the gallery, and the body of the viewer. Predominantly sculptural in nature, the installation is comprised of eight plant/prosthetic objects of various shapes and sizes, spread throughout the gallery. The organically shaped objects house embedded houseplants that visually reference tree like forms. Each of the sculptural objects include a built in sub woofer with metal branches rising from it, to hold the two small speakers close to the leafy part of the plant, and function as a sound system. Each object contains both sensors and speakers, so that the sound being played to the plants is directly affected by the viewer’s location and proximity. When the installation is at rest the Plant iPods play sound files of people breathing. As the viewer moves through the space, the sounds of the plants that s/he is closest to drifts in and out of stories told in multiple languages. Individually the sounds are not loud and require that the viewer move in close in order to hear the stories, closing the physical space between the body of the viewer and the plants.

This work explores the poetics involved in creating new relationships between human and plant life, and subverts the traditional hierarchy, which positions plant life below human life. The installation evokes the possibility of developing technologies that are nature-centric rather than human-centric – and breaths life back into the idea of the enchanted forest.