+Nature

+Nature was the marquee exhibition of the Convergence Lab at the Banff Centre, a ten-day residency bringing together multidisciplinary artists and technologists, with technical support from Moment Factory. Seven Canadian artists were invited to bring the space to life. The summit that followed drew a sold-out crowd including guests from the Barbican, FACT Liverpool, and Hexagram-Concordia, with Meyer Sound providing spatial audio technology and Moment Factory's Eric Fournier delivering the opening keynote.

The installation was conceived, built, and projected entirely within two weeks. Visitors arrived to find branded logs waiting for them, each one an invitation to feed the fire. No explanation was given. What they discovered over time was that the health of the fire was directly correlated to the energy stasis of the show, a living feedback loop between the audience and the work.

The sound drew from every corner of the residency: recordings from the classical music program captured on various instruments, hoop dancing recorded and projection mapped into the trees, field recordings from overseas travels, and intimate recordings woven throughout. A custom sensor robot we affectionately called Wall-e monitored the fire in real time, using microphones, temperature sensors, and luminosity sensors to gauge the state of the show and feed that data back into the system. The installation also took over every television screen at the Banff Centre to exclusively broadcast the video feed of the fire in the spirit of Pirate Radio stations.

The image of people gathered around that fire while the mountainside blazed with colour, red, cyan, gold washing through snow-covered pines, sound filling the valley, bouncing off rock faces, competing with wind and silence and the sheer scale of the mountains. This project planted seeds deep in me that I've carried through my body of work ever since.