Contact Zone Level 1 is an infinitely changing computer-generated animation. Two sites of rewilding collide—the Swiss Alps and the artist’s intestines—while an AI monitors them, itching to intervene. The animation is populated by imaged creatures generated by computer models, conjured by text-to-image AI algorithms, and captured by automated camera traps in the forest. It is accompanied by a seven-chapter soundtrack that uses sonic strategies of repetition, interruption, and release in weaving together ecological and mythological histories with philosophies of seeing, knowing, and controlling. The animation unfolds in endless permutations as the algorithm assembles the narrative order; field recordings; location, time and weather; creature actions; and camera views in ever-new variations, enabling fresh meanings to emerge.
Biography
Miriam Simun is an artist working at the intersection of ecological crisis, emergent technology, and somatic practice in multiple formats including video, performance, installation, writing and drawing. Trained as a sociologist and taking on the role of artist-as-fieldworker, Simun spends time within communities of experts, including biomedical engineers, carnivore conservationists, hunters, cephalopods, free divers, and breastfeeding mothers, to create research-based artworks rooted in lived experience. Simun’s practice excavates the poetic and the political from collisions of human and non-human bodies among rapidly evolving techno-ecosystems.