Erin Cooney
“Podscape” is a story/processing network, consisting of a system of pods that represent stories from plants, animals, humans, fungus and things, set in the Capital/Anthropocene. They are a collection from humans that were co-created with nonhumans via a workshop ritual. The co-creation between human and nonhuman manifests in a machine-learning model trained on extinct bird sounds. All these elements contribute to an audio-sensory and interactive installation.
Description
Podscape co-creators participate in a workshop ritual “Embodied Storytelling/Nature Portal”, that generates pod stories and simultaneously creates the world communally. Participants create stories through somatic exercises that attune participants to non-dominant forms of sensing/information receiving from nonhumans, accompanied with writing exercises. The workshop looks at the binary of fiction & non-fiction, natureculture divide, animism, perspectivism, nonhuman communication and vital materiality. Additionally, the ritual is a reproducible experience that can exist separately from the podscape.
I’m also training a machine learning model trained on collected extinct bird recordings using WaveGAN. WaveGAN is a machine learning algorithm which learns to generate raw audio waveforms. This is a celebrating their existence along with mourning their extinction. The model explores the queering of dead and living, a liminal chimera of species that normally wouldn’t interact in close physical proximity. It interacts with something “dead” regeneratively.
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Thesis