Tully Arnot's work Epiphytes (working title) is the 2019 recipient of the $80,000 Mordant Family VR Commission. Epiphytes will be presented at ACMI in 2021.
This talk is presented by ACMI and the Mordant Family VR Commission. The Mordant Family VR Commission is a partnership between Catriona Mordant AM and Simon Mordant AM, ACMI and the City of Melbourne.
About Tully Arnot
Tully Arnot is one of Australia’s leading visual artists. His work utilises found objects, tech and the manufactured items of modern life to create absurdist sculptures and installations, and is designed to challenge the way we interact with ourselves and technology.
Arnot has exhibited across Australia, UK, Germany, Belgium, Italy, China, Russia, and New Zealand. His work has increasingly incorporated video, documentary, performance and experimental media as a means for understanding how technology mediates our relationship with the natural world.
Arnot's work addresses the role of automation and simulation, often looking at robotic and less-sentient substitutes for humans and human interactions. Many of his projects investigate innovations in plant robotics, as well as emergent research into plant communication and consciousness.
About the host
Shelley McSpedden is a curator with a passion for contemporary visual art. Prior to joining ACMI, she worked across a number of visual arts organisations, including Monash University Museum of Art (MUMA) and NETS Victoria. She has also held research and teaching roles at Monash University and RMIT, and has written extensively across a range of arts publications.
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Transcript
Shelley McSpedden
Okay. Thanks for joining us today. My name is Shelley McSpedden. I'm a curator at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image. Today I'll be talking with Sydney-based artist Tully Arnot about a major new work that he's doing for the third and final Mordant Family VR Commission. Before we begin, though, I'd like to acknowledge the traditional owners, the Wurundjeri and Boonwurrung people of the Kulin Nation, the Darug and the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation, on whose land Tully and I respectively work and we're remotely meeting from here. We pay our respects to the elders past and present and extend our respect to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples from all nations of this land.
The Mordant Family VR Commission has been held at ACMI for the past three years and it supports Australian visual artists who've established a practice in some other medium to experiment and extend their practice using VR technologies. Commissioned artists, such as Tully, receive $80,000 to develop the project, and they also get the fabulous support of curatorial support from ACMI curators and presentation support. Tully's work will be eventually shown at ACMI once we relaunch after the coronavirus has gone on its way. The VR Commission is a partnership between Catriona Mordant, Simon Mordant, the City of Melbourne, and ACMI.
Tully has established a really substantial sculptural and installation practice that explores a way that we interact with technology, with nature, and with each other. I'd say he has a very absurdist bent, and often combines really complex technologies with everyday materials in a way that really makes us look at the world around us in different ways and shifts our perspective of it. Tully's work foregrounds these intangible dimensions of our relationship with the things around us, and in doing so, he really suggests new ways of thinking and interacting with that world around us and with the material physical world around us.
His recent work engages with the emergent fields of plant robotics and tension between organic and digital existences. Thanks for talking with me today, Tully. It's great to have this opportunity. I know you're in the middle of developing this project for the Commission, and loosely, I know that the project engages with plant movement and plant communication systems. I was hoping you could tell us a little bit about your interest in this field and what really drew you to use VR technologies. What made you want to explore this medium?
Tully Arnot
Yeah. Hi.
SM
Hi.
TA
Yeah. I grew up spending a lot of time in the bush with a very large backyard, going to a bit of a hippie bush school for a while, and so interactions with natural environments were always a part of myself, my identity, but I think in terms of it coming into my creative practice, there was a pivotal moment in 2013, reading Michael Pollan's article in The New Yorker, The Intelligent Plant.
I guess it was a really interesting thing where he had brought together a lot of different theorists and writers and looked at plant sciences and the way that new technology was allowing an understanding of plant communication or plant memory or interaction in a way that really left behind what was happening in the '60s and built on more rigorous scientific knowledge. It's something that at first glance does seem a little bit imaginative, but then there's a lot of science to back it up.
Reading his article, I started working with plants in my own work. Initially I was very interested in technology and robotics and different things like that, and created these robotic plants which interacted, responded to viewers and audiences, and then more recently, in 2018, I think it was, I created a work at Carriageworks for Performance Space, which was a dance piece which was an interaction between a dancer and bean plants, and looking at that bodily interaction as a form of communication.
In terms of virtual reality, I've always been interested in how we mediate our relationships through consumer technology, the way that the technology creates this sort of interface, and can kind of stand in for a lot of those different relationships. Virtual reality being a cutting-edge consumer technology is something that was obviously very interesting to me.
SM
Yeah. I mean, it does seem like a real extension of, yeah, the different kind of digital platforms that you've played with your sculptural practice.
TA
Yep.
SM
Yeah.
TA
In terms of technology, it's a fantastic example of, in coronavirus times, the way that everything is mediated. With a virtual reality headset, you can somewhat inhabit other worlds or interact with people in the same way that we're doing right now through Zoom, or on Houseparty with our friends.
SM
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. It is really interesting, isn't it, how, yeah, the coronavirus is making us connect and reach out into the world through these mediated ways, and how they can kind of fill a void, I guess, of that face-to-face connection.
TA
Yep.
SM
You've got this ongoing interest in plants, then, and something that you've been exploring, and the language of plants and these kind of physical language of plants, and I know that you've been working on this project in consultation with the plant scientist Professor Monica Gagliano. Sorry, is that how you pronounce her name?
TA
Monica Gagliano.
SM
Yeah. She's a pioneering researcher in plant science and communication. I guess, what has she added to this project? What are you taking from her depth of knowledge in this field?
TA
Yeah. I happened upon Monica Gagliano through Michael Pollan's essay. She was based in Western Australia at the time, and I guess was the closest academic to me geographically. I was interested in her work, and luckily enough was in Perth a few years back, I think 2016, and just wrote to her out of the blue, and we met up and established communication then. She's really interesting. She is a plant biologist. She came from animal biology, but moved into plants.
She had a book, The Language of Plants, that she put out in 2017. It's kind of threefold. It looked at plant biology, the way that we can now measure communication between plants through chemical signaling, different things like the rhizomatic connections through root systems, but at the same time, also looked at literary references, how we frame what plants are through stories, and then looked at philosophical understandings of plants and our relationships with them, so things that took more of a post-human perspective within that.
I think that's a really strong perspective for a scientist to take. I think it's very easy for people to really silo themselves in their own fields, and she's very much about creating connections with other faculties. I guess she's a very interesting person because when you ask her a question, she says, "Do you want me to answer as a scientist or answer as a gardener or answer as a person that has a more emotional connection to plants?" We can all be these different things that at times contradict themselves, and I think within all of our different industries, there's not as much room for contradiction, but I think I'm really excited by the way that she approaches things from multiple perspectives.
SM
Yeah. This project's a kind of interesting space, I guess, for her, as well, the science and the art converging in a kind of experiential mode, as well, so there's this convergence, which possibly opens up new things.
TA
Yep. Well, she's moved to Sydney now, so I get to see her a little bit more. I recently went to a conference with her at Sydney University, which it got renamed at the last minute, but the original working title for the conference was something about brainless cognition. It looked at cognition in different organisms, from plants to viruses to bacteria, and the way that organisms without brains are capable of cognition at a certain level.
She talks about cognition or consciousness within plants, but then within this conference, there were a lot of scientists, philosophers, different people debating what cognition is and what different organisms satisfy the criteria for cognition. Then sitting in on that as an artist, I was massively out of my depth in terms of the science, but it was incredibly rewarding, and I think it's great to have those spaces that open up for people to cross over.
SM
Yep. Great. Obviously her work is around the language of plants, and I guess one of the main focal points or one of the interests that you're exploring in this project is a midpoint, the language between plants and humans, or this kind of space where they can communicate to each other. I wondered if you could talk a little bit about how that's informing what you're doing and how you're playing with those ideas in your actual work itself.
TA
Yep. Yeah. Well, overall, I frame my project as a lingua franca, a sort of language between plants and humans that is part of both but exterior to both. There's a lot of different ways that I've been approaching that. I think the most immediate one that I started working with was understanding scent or chemical emissions and how that is used by plants to communicate, but then that's a part of the work, though I'm using scent in the work, but I think that just felt a little bit too straightforward.
Speaking with Monica, she mentioned a plant can perceive infrared light and the infrared heat of an organism being around it, so understanding something that's more in line with the visual interpretation, and especially given that the virtual reality headset is essentially a visual medium, trying to understand how to bring vision into that, so thinking in a sense of the use of shadow rather than the use of light, the use of absence as a way of indicating presence or non-presence.
I think humans perceive light and shadow. Plants perceive shadow in this. It's important for them to move away from the shadow to get light, and understanding that the way that they perceive that is similar to us, it's through photoreceptors throughout the plant body, and focusing on that, yeah, less visual form of visual perception, I think, sits between humans and plants much better.
SM
Yep. Yeah. It was interesting when we were speaking previously, it really struck me, that idea of creating a virtual reality work which in a lot of ways is really about, you're playing with absence and the things you can't see a lot. It's kind of a nice challenge, but yeah. I think, also, we were talking about the way that I guess I've observed that plants and nature have become a really hot topic for artists working in VR.
You see a lot of that work emerging in at least the last year or so, but I think a lot of that work is very about replicating the kind of beauty and grandeur of nature, because I think you're really trying to do something quite different, and I guess that play with shadows and absence is really indicative of that. I wondered if you could talk more about some of the kind of haptic experiential elements that you're working on in the work, as well, so moving away from that kind visual, more into the bodily, or how do you play with that in the work?
TA
Yeah. I guess with the shadow, it's definitely... I remember when I was putting together the proposal for the Commission, and I was at my collaborator Josh Harle's house. He's doing a lot of the VR for me. I walked past a window where there were some trees outside and saw the light filtering through and projecting the shadow onto the floor, and it got me really thinking of the way you can see the shadow from a canopy of a forest and how that implies nature that's not there, or not immediately visible. There's a lot about what can imply something that's not there. How can I represent an ecosystem without focusing on the sublime beauty of these trees in that space?
Yeah. Definitely within the work, I've been developing scent emitters which are situated around the space. It's something that I've been testing out so far, looking at how you can really build an environment just with smell. You can augment the visuals with a much more bodily sense. I guess, as well, the use of sound has become a really important element. There was a little while during the development of the work where I decided to have no visuals at all and to just have sound and sense.
SM
That's a very brave move.
TA
There will be elements of the work where there's no visuals, and the sound that I've been working with... I guess a lot of people don't think about the way sound is used in VR and the capabilities of the headsets in doing that, and there's a lot of things that you can do with the three-dimensionality and very focused spatiality of sound in VR that aren't possible in real life. You can have a sound that is emitting in a small sphere of space that is maybe full volume in that space but doesn't bleed at all outside of it.
In creating these soundscapes, I've put together a lot of field recordings from natural environments, and within the headset, there's still light coming in, but there's not a representation of an environment, and you're essentially... Well, when I first experienced it, I was just crawling around the ground trying to find these different sounds. There was a river that I had put underneath the ground, and so I had to really put my head against the carpet to get to it. It really creates quite a vivid visualization of an environment when you start engaging with it like that.
SM
Yep. Yeah. It's really interesting, your work with sound. I mean, we've spoken before about the fact that you, in your day job, work as an educator at the MCA, and part of that involves the audio descriptions of exhibitions. That kind of thinking in those other realms is clearly informing your approach. Do you want to have a little expand on that in any way?
TA
Yeah. Yeah. Well, I guess working in audio description for the MCA, there was quite a learning curve in terms of understanding how to present visual artworks for people in a non-visual way, working with people who are visually impaired or blind, and how to best present something, communicate something for them to interpret. Because a lot of our audiences are quite old, the format is, we take them on a tour through the gallery and then sit down and have coffee and biscuits after, and there's this very nice social element to it.
I remember on my first shift, this woman was explaining... She was telling us about her house, and she was completely blind, but describing the art collection that she had at home. The halls were lined with paintings, every room had sculptures and paintings and different things in them, and she described every single one. It really got me thinking about how we represent visual information. It's not just with our eyes. It's through the imagination.
That visualization of her space, I found that very interesting. Obviously she doesn't want to live in a boring white cube of a space. She wants a vibrant place filled with artworks and interesting things like the rest of us, and thinking about how she communicated that to me, and the way that language and the imagination can be part of this process.
SM
Yeah. Yeah, and that's that interesting thing about how our brains and imagination fill in those gaps, I guess, or the absences. Yeah. It's really interesting. Hearing you talk about that and hearing about you crawling around on the floor and the way that sound can function in different ways in VR than in the real world, it made me wonder about what you have discovered through using this medium. What are some of the things that have maybe surprised you in working with this and with VR? What have you learned, and how has that kind extended what you're able to do or your creative remit? Have there been any major challenges or things you've found frustrating about using it as a medium?
TA
I think at first, yeah. Because usually I work for myself and all of the electronics I make, I usually build them all myself and code them myself, and with this, it's a new technology that I don't understand, so working with someone else and not having that immediate feedback of creating something and then seeing how it works, it has been a bit difficult personally, but then at the same time, because we've been in lockdown, I've been learning a lot of VR myself and have had the opportunity-
SM
Very good citizen, upskilling. Good on you.
TA
Well, I think it mostly came about... I find it really hard to be creative at the moment, and the headspace that you need to think creatively is very different to the logical approach to learning a skill like that. It's been a great distraction and a great little project. I think that a lot of artists really function in this good, sort of autodidactic way where we've all learned skills off YouTube, we've all spent a lot of time by ourselves learning things, and so working with Unity, learning how to build virtual reality environments has been really rewarding in terms of better understanding the language and how I can communicate with Joshua Harle, who's doing the VR for me, and then also building my own environments and being able to more immediately interact with those.
SM
Yep. Yeah, interesting. Talking about corona and being in lockdown, I mean, we talked about the mediated nature of a lot of our communication, but has it changed or is it informing the way that you're thinking about our relationship to nature in any way, or you're already connected?
TA
I think, yeah, it has. When you say that, it makes me think about it, but I think when I go for walks, I leave the house so infrequently, and I've noticed that going for walks and just looking at flowers on trees and things like that has become an essential part of my day. Within the project, there's an underlying inspiration of the hanami, the flower viewing party, it's a Japanese term, and this idea of just going out to view flowers and just sit under a tree that's flowering and enjoy it. I think that respect for pure enjoyment of natural environments is something that I'm really developing right now.
SM
Yeah. I don't think you're alone. I'm lucky to live near some big open parks, and every day when I go for my walk, there are just so many people out there, and it is really interesting. I think there is something really comforting and almost essential about being in nature, it feels like, particularly at a time of anxiety, of mass anxiety.
TA
Yeah.
SM
Yeah. I just wanted to talk about a few other things that's fed into the project and how you've been thinking about this subject. You mentioned to me your research or interest in the L-system, which I had never heard about, but the Lindenmayer system, which is, sorry, this is my limited understanding, a kind of fractal system which is used to describe the behavior of plants or how they're predicting how they're going to grow, as well.
TA
Yep.
SM
Yeah. I wondered if you could talk a little bit about that and, yeah, how that's informing what you're doing or thinking.
TA
Yeah. Well, I think within the VR, I'm approaching a lot of different representations of implied nature or implied plants, and so that might be with the shadows falling from a canopy. It might be from the scent of a plant or the scent of a different natural phenomena. It could be from the bioacoustics of plants or different elements like that. But with the L-system, I think it's really interesting the way that... With all science, it's a categorization or a reduction of nature.
With the L-system, it's just a really beautiful extension of that to, essentially, an algorithm. With that algorithm, you can create a pretty good approximation of the way that a tree will grow or the way that a bacteria will grow. Within Unity, the VR software that we're using, there exists a few of these different L-system frameworks, and you can import some information and it will generate trees for you or generate different plants for you through this algorithm. Yeah. I think reducing these things to language, to an algorithm, it, I guess, goes back to that sense of absence that is part of a lot of the work, or the implication of something that's not there.
SM
Yeah. Yeah. There's something interesting about that reduction to an algorithm or a kind of symbolic language and how that... Yeah. You mentioned earlier when you were talking about Monica's work, how her work engaged with this idea of post-humanism, beyond the human, where the human is decentered. Do you feel like this is a big part of what you're trying to do, talk about?
TA
Yeah. Yeah. But it's an impossible thing to do.
SM
Yeah. You're also using a medium that puts a headset on a human, so yes, it is impossible.
TA
Yep. Yep. But at the same time, I guess, in understanding how you can decenter the human somewhat, I guess it's like focusing on exactly how it is that we're perceiving or understanding things. The human visual perception, it's unique to us in a way that plants or a lot of other organisms don't really favor vision in the way that we do, and focusing on how it is that we're perceiving the world and how differently we might be able to perceive things, it's a challenge that hopefully this work will touch on in some kind of way.
SM
Yeah. We'd had a discussion previously about how some of your meditation practice had kind of fed into the work. I know that you're not Buddhist yourself, but you've mentioned this Buddhist parable, is it, about this flower, and it kind of, I guess, encapsulates this idea of how you can move beyond a human language. I wondered, can you tell about that so I don't get wrong?
TA
Yeah, let me just remember. I forget the term for it. What was it?
SM
Oh, yeah. Sorry.
TA
Oh, yeah. Yeah, the flower sermon. It was a teaching where it was a wordless sermon where Buddha walked in and produced a single white flower and held it in his hands, and one of the disciples smiled. It was within the story, that smile indicates that they received the information of what this sermon was, and the idea of presenting a flower and somehow transmitting wisdom through that, I find, I guess, it's a very interesting thing.
It's essentially what we're doing with art, in a weird sense, presenting something that doesn't have a translation in language, there's no way you could encapsulate it in language, and then it affects us in these different ways that is quite profound, I think. When I experience art that really moves me, it's often not something that I can really articulate, and I guess maybe the flower sermon is similar to that.
SM
Yep. Well, that seems like a poignant moment to finish our discussion. Thank you so much for talking with me today. I'm really looking forward to seeing the work or experiencing it when we finally reopen. Thank you.
TA
Thank you.