Twists and Turns - 2014 “The installation uses successive layers of suspended clear glass plates to reflect three blue and three red lasers. The movement of the glass plates caused by the draft in the room scatters the light reflections across the walls”
Random International is a London-based studio that focuses on digital media, interactive art and installation. Rain Room invites visitors to leisurely walk through falling water without getting soaked. Hidden sensors follow human motion and create a controlled area of dryness. The powerful sound of pouring rain envelopes as you experience virtual mother nature. There’s something soothing about watching rain in the comfort and safety of your home. This takes that experience to an impressive level. In Rain Room, the rain clouds will part for you.
Def: transfiguration a : a change in form or appearance: metamorphosis b : an exalting, glorifying, or spiritual change
In response to the theme of ‘Alchemy’ Woolston presents an installation that places an image of her Orthodox Jewish immigrant great grandparents next to one of Latin Americas largest landfills, skeletal red stag jawbones next to an inter-generationally inherited collection of liqueurs. This is a space of allegory and memento mori, of waste piled high outside a favela and abundant flowers surrounding a cemetery.
‘Robyn Woolston’s work provides the personal linear narrative, but uses internationally significant histories to support it.’
Patrick Kirk-Smith / Art in Liverpool
In the spirit of ‘turning base metal into gold’ the work situates our rites of passage at the centre of a transfigurative narrative.
‘A change of (s)cene: reviewing our place in a new geological epoch’
University of Lincoln
31st August – 2nd September 2016
I shall be exhibiting and contributing to a postgraduate conference during Autumn that’s using ‘Habitus’ (2013) as it’s headline image.
‘In 2016, the International Commission on Stratigraphy is due to consider formalising the Anthropocene as a new geological epoch. In light of this, the conference aims to review and reflect on what literature and culture might have to say about our place in a world shaped by human activity. With a keen interest in ecological systems, anthropogenic processes and the interaction between humans and nonhumans, ecocritics and the environmental humanities have already begun to open up discussion about the origins and implications of the Anthropocene; ultimately questioning what this might mean for humanity and our planetary home. The conference will facilitate an interdisciplinary dialogue between different approaches to the study of climate change, environmental distress and various eco-catastrophes.’
Submissions:
Individual papers will be 20 minutes long. Please send a 300 word abstract and a 50 word biography to Michelle Poland, Rebecca Ford and Alex Bevan – [email protected] – by 31st March 2016. Proposals for panels are also welcome: please send a 200 word summary of the rationale for the panel, in addition to individual abstracts. Any further enquires can sent to the above email address.
Possible topics might include, but are certainly not limited to:
Planetary history and deep time; human and natural temporalities
Major or minor, global or local climatic events
Postcolonial ecocriticism
Disaster, extinction, end of nature, apocalypse
Waste, pollution and sustainability
Industrial developments, new technology, energy challenges
Nature/culture, human/nonhuman boundaries
Narratives of change, imagined futures
Affects and aesthetics
Romantic nature, Gothic nature, EcoGothic
Ecopsychology: internal and external crisis
Environmental philosophy, environmental and animal ethics, environmental law (e.g. 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Paris)
I’m barely exaggerating when I say this is one of the scariest things I’ve ever fucking seen. Imagine being high in this situation. I would walk out of that room with a new mental illness
Going to this bar on a fun trip to Japan, getting drunk, having to piss, and walking in and seeing this shit. I would be uncomfortably silent for the rest of the night at least.
This is just tremendously disturbing to me, I keep thinking about what it would feel like to be in this room. There’s a sense of trust in my surroundings I expect when I’m in a public bathroom and to have to choose between this and nothing is psychological torture. This is satanic
Am I fucking insane or something for feeling this strongly about this horrific device? Am I missing some cultural context that makes this acceptable? I’ll be honest, I don’t think I fucking am! This is a god damn nightmare, everything about this. I thought seeing it in motion would in some way betray it’s status as a weird plastic statue and not anything resembling an animate being but that only adds to the horror of it. I want to erase this thing from existence, I’m not kidding
