2023
Installation
Ice Follies, North Bay, Canada.
with Public Visualization Studio
in collaboration with ArtFix, Near North Media Lab, and Jorge de Oliveira
Innumerable Ones presents creatures inspired by Jorge Luis Borges’ The Book of Imaginary Beings. Beings were conjured by collaborators connected to ArtFix and Near North Mobile Media Lab (N2M2L) in North Bay. Short descriptions and sketches developed through a series of workshops with Public Visualization Studio were then transformed into three-dimensional digital masks and displayed on 83” QLED screens.
One screen was mounted in a free-standing “hut” in the middle of frozen Lake Nipissing. Another screen was set up in the DGTL Creator North space at the Capitol Centre. The masks look back at the viewers, tracking them in real-time through motion-sensing cameras and AI-generated animations. Narration of the descriptions of each Innumerable One accompanies the images.
Through processes of social and technical translation, this project aims to explore our complex and often fragile relationships to place, identity, and the natural world by combining, dramatizing, and questioning concepts of description, classification, and belonging.
Presented by Near North Mobile Media Lab for Ice Follies 2023, North Bay, Canada.
Photos 1-8 by Liz Lott, courtesy of Ice Follies
