1 meter diameter Carved dead pine tree, acrylic paint
The work is a site-specific sculpture consisting of a dead pine tree I carved on for a week. I look at it as a portrait of the old tree. An intuitive processing of the body it has left to life in the forest. And an attempt to express the experience I had of the tree while I worked on it.
The breath that leaves me, stay inside, Corporum, Aarhus, DK
Variable Dimensions Carved and painted pieces of aspen wood
I carved portraits of tree logs and tried to let the wood pieces steer my knife while working on them. I wanted to let the tree influence me before I overruled with a form of expression.
H20 x W6 x L25 cm, 15 pages, 13 editions Artist book in collaboration with Sara Rönnbäck
The book deals with a meeting with three trees and a litter of rabbits on our small farm. The book consists of seven handmade pages with associated texts. The texts describe experiences and thoughts on working with the trees and rabbits. On the left page is an amplifier and speaker for a tree. The bottom right page shows a conversation between three trees. The book is part of Concerning the Spiritual in Art, curated by Locus and LATERNA, and presented at among others the Norwegian Institute in Athens during the opening week of Documenta 14, at the Cosmocow International Art Fair 2017 and Bergen Art Book Fair.
Aldea Center for Contemporary Art, Bergen, NO Borealis Festival for Experimental Music, Bergen
Video documentation of performance
Conversation between Bodies is a collaboration between Daniel Slåttnes and Sara Rönnbäck that has been going on since 2015.
In the project, we investigate ways of communication and the limits of understanding the materials as radical non-humans, and each other as fundamentally estranged by nature.
In a performance we wear masks, which also functions as EEG devices. The devices record electrical signals created by our brains and translate it into sound.
The sculptures carry similar devices that act as amplifiers for the materials’ electromagnetic fields, which also are translated to sound.
In the overall sound, we imagine a super-organism together with the materials and the space.
Over the past year, I’ve been researching how six houseplants interact with each other and the things around them. They have robotic prostheses as a tool for me to see their reactions immediately instead of weeks later.
This resulted in a journal with observations and reflections around the life of the houseplants:
Meta.Morf X – Digital Wild, Gråmølna Trondheim Kunstmuseum, NO
In 2015 I started off an artistic collaboration with a houseplant. The plant, an ordinary baby rubber plant (P. obtusifolia) happened to sit on my desk when I asked What is life?
I started simply by spending time with the houseplant. This grew a bodily connection. I discovered that we have another commonality in the biosignals going through our bodies. By amplifying the electrical signals via electrodes on my scalp and on the plant’s leaves, we could listen to each other’s vibrations.
During the experiments on the plant’s electrophysiology, I wondered if the plant could be taught to move a robotic prosthesis. It would help the collaboration tremendously if we could be on the same time scale. After a lot of work with programmers, data scientists, and electrical engineers we managed to give the plant a prosthesis that reacted to its bio-signals with the help of machine learning.