We Come in Peace 👽🍄🏳️🌈
The Seaport, Pier 17, New York (2019) Artscape, Cape Town (2019)
- Production
- Duration
- 18 LED screens
- 5 minutes
"Landscapes shimmer when they gather rhythms shared across varied forms of life. Shimmer describes the coming in and out of focus of multi-species knots, with their cascading effects."—Deborah Bird Rose, Professor in Environmental Humanities
Commissioned to celebrate the 50th Anniversary of World Pride Month in New York, We Come in Peace is a screen-based work that takes the form of a virtual dance party. This artwork celebrates the inseparable connection we have to other life forms, both human and more than human—a celebration of diversity and biodiversity.
We share this planet with an incredible assemblage of strange and alien lifeforms. This project collapses the boundaries between us and them and envisions interconnectedness as an eternal, synchronized, multi-species dance.
To create this work, 3D scans were taken of participants from around the world. These scans were sculpted into hybrid creatures inspired by slime mold, sea slugs, fungi, and other terrestrial and aquatic life forms. These hybrid organisms were then trained to dance in a real-time game engine.
The final artwork was installed on eighteen LED screens across four floors in the glass atrium at Pier 17 in Manhattan.
The Seaport, Pier 17, New York
