Translucent Kinship
WHAT:
A multichannel video installation using laser derived data of a forest in recovery, premiered for ANAT SPECTRA 2025: Reciprocity. This is the second outcome of the forthcoming Forest Art Intelligence Project (FAI) (2023-) which aims to return a currently cleared block of land back to high conservation-value forest at Samford Ecological Research Station (SERF), near Brisbane, Australia.
Translucent Kinship aims to learn from the intelligent and creative reciprocities of an emergent forest. Plants and environments thrive in profoundly reciprocal relationships forming inseparable bonds dependent upon co-creative cycles of giving, receiving and exchange. However, their extraordinary "collective intelligence' is quite unlike our own self-conscious human intelligence, and so we often fail to recognise or learn from it, preferring instead to privilege intelligences much more like us. Translucent Kinship explores and evokes these ideas of indivisibility and profound reciprocity between plants and place.
OUTCOMES:
1: ANAT Synapse Reciprocity 2025, UnicSC, Immerse Lab, Sunshine Coast, Australia, 2-3 Oct, 2025. (Download catalogue)
PARTNERS:
The Australian Network of Art and Technology (ANAT) in partnership with the University of the Sunshine Coast (UniSC), hosted ANAT SPECTRA 2025: Reciprocity on Kabi Kabi/Gubbi Gubbi Country, in the heart of the Sunshine Coast Biosphere Reserve. Special thanks Melissa DeLaney (ANAT) and team, Toby Gifford and Leah Barclay (UniSC).
Further supported by The Australian Government through Creative Australia, its arts funding and advisory body, SERF (Samford Environmental Research Facility) and the NCRIS-enabled Terrestrial Ecosystem Research Network (TERN), Lorrelle Allen + Site Technician Marcus Yates, QUT More Than Human Futures Group and the Centre for the Environment and Society. Collaborating Science Team: Dr David Tucker, Dr Gabrielle Lebbink, Dr Eleanor Velasquez (TERN) and Marcus Yates. Visual data set collected and processed to registered point cloud by Dr. Dmitry Bratanov and Gavin Broadbent, Research Engineering Facility, Office of Research Infrastructure, QUT, Brisbane, Australia.
BACKGROUND:
Concepts of “thing” and “environment” are inextricably connected. They belong together; they presuppose each other. Nothing exists in isolation. Nothing exists without a larger world to which it belongs. Holdrege, C and McAlice, J, ‘Are plants intelligent, An initial exploration’, from In Context #5, Spring 2024.
Translucent Kinship is a multi screen immersive video installation that draws upon Laser (LiDAR) based imagery of the FAI site, recorded over the past 2 years. The LiDAR scanning process registers myriads of light-reflecting surfaces across the entire site, abstracted into a massive cloud of data points. Whilst each point registers the temporal presence of an organic surface at a moment in time, when viewed together these millions of points imply an organism of unimaginable complexity. And when these points are animated and rendered - ghost-like and translucent - and framed through non-human perspectives (e.g. ultra closeup, far below, deep within, or through), collectively they begin to intimate the radically different ways of 'being together' in the world. The matting of other ghosted media deep within the point clouds - representing the additional organic installation elements adde to the site - accompanied by a complex mix of found sounds gathered from the site, further informs this immersive artwork that speaks to differently intelligent, reciprocal, non-human communities of care and kinship.
.. the question of intelligence in nature shifts away from applying a specific definition to different types of beings in the world to asking: What are different ways of being in the world and what do they reveal? The notion of intelligence can in this way become more nuanced and grow when we take different kinds of creatures on earth seriously in their specific ways of being...
Holdrege, C and McAlice, J, ‘Are plants intelligent, An initial exploration’, from In Context #5, Spring 2024.
Plants and environments thrive in profoundly reciprocal relationships - forming inseparable bonds dependent upon co-creative cycles of giving, receiving and exchange. However, their extraordinary 'collective intelligence' is quite unlike our own self-conscious human intelligence, and so we often fail to recognise or learn from them, preferring instead to privilege intelligences much more 'like us'. Translucent Kinship is the second artwork outcome from the Forest Art Intelligence Project (FAI) project, which aims to learn from the intelligent, creative reciprocities of plants in place.
By freeing an ancient 2Ha. forest site in Samford, Qld since 2023 from its longstanding colonial-era regime of clearing/slashing, by letting what emerges flourish, and by embedding ‘art-intelligences’ into that re-emergent forest, the project reminds us that all ecosystems are complex, intelligent, reciprocating organisms. No plant living with/in that site therefore acts in isolation. Despite all originating from the same slashed area of pasture, each ‘species’ has created quite different versions of themselves – through complex reciprocal dances with air, water, soil, minerals, sunshine, insects, mycorrhizal networks and mammals. Hence whilst each plant does not have a pre-prescribed size, nor predetermined numbers of leaves or stems, no matter what their current size or stature – they all are reciprocal intelligent, full expressions of their local ‘plant-place-times’. The artwork "Translucent Kinship" explores and evokes these ideas of indivisibility and profound reciprocity between plants and place.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT OF COUNTRY:
We acknowledge and pay respects to the First Nations of the land known as Australia. We recognise all Traditional Owners and their continued cultural, spiritual and technological practices. We also acknowledge and pay respects to all First Nations peoples beyond Australian shores. As the very first storytellers, First Nations peoples hold invaluable knowledge and perspectives that are vital in the research, interrogation and development of traditional and emerging technologies, across both our physical and digital realms. Together we are gathering across many unceded lands that have been forcibly colonised.
ANAT SPECTRA 2025: Reciprocity celebrates and acknowledges the Traditional Custodians of the lands of the Kabi Kabi people, and pay respects to their Elders past and present. ANAT’s home base is on Kaurna Yerta and they work widely across Country.