terra_forms

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Video installation, interactive robot

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2025, forthcoming 

 

Terra_forms is a work-in-progress video installation that explores novel ways in which glitch practices and artificial intelligence engines can visualize climate devastation while charting an ethics for using AI to address ecological disaster in our current Anthropocene. The proposed exhibition of terra_forms will consist of eight large-scale animated video murals and a corresponding interactive soft robot that will wander the gallery space and react to ongoing changes in temperature, humidity, sound, and light within the surrounding environment. Animated through datamoshing and AI diffusion models, terra_forms imagines speculative ecologies of the Appalachian region that draw critical attention to climate change through concepts of terraforming; or rather, modifying a planetary body to make it habitable for human life. Here, I reconfigure terraforming not as a process of colonization rooted in hegemonic, anthropocentric flows of power and capital, but rather as an artistic practice of destructive generativity: one that reassigns agency to non-human animal, plant, and fungal intelligence. Drawing from 19th century panoramic technology, Ukiyo-e Japanese landscapes, and

contemporary videogame aesthetics, terra_forms works to rhetorically express global inequalities through immersive      worlding, ritual, and mythmaking.