LUCA
Bianca Shonee Arroyo-Kreimes & Jorge Luis García González
LUCA is an audio-visual installation which seeks to deconstruct the boundary between inner and outer worlds, by playing with the unity of the origin of all things. The virtual reality project is inspired by the Last Universal Common Ancestor theory, which postulates that one organism is the ancestor of all life on Earth. Heavily processed found sounds ranging from machine guns to bird songs expand upon the idea of interconnectedness while viewers can come and go, by travelling both in and outside of the body of a creature of unknown origin. Inspired by Laurie Spiegel’s Unseen Worlds,sonic elements propose a mix of natural and artificial sounds that aim to portray the soundscape of the ecosystem living inside LUCA. Visual elements for LUCA remain largely speculative while deriving inspiration from the existing morphology of bacteria, protists, and yeasts.
Shonee (Maleku, b. Bianca Shonee Arroyo-Kreimes) is a Montreal-based Costa Rican-Canadian digital media artist. She holds a bachelor’s degree in Film Animation from Concordia University, where she is currently an MFA candidate in Intermedia. She is the 2021 recipient of EQ Bank’s Emerging Digital Artists Award and has presented work at MUTEK, National Film Board of Canada, Société des arts technologiques and Filmgate Miami. Growing up on the edge of a rainforest in Costa Rica nourishes her creative practice as her work strives to resurrect the meaning of nature’s place in her own life now as both an urbanite and multidisciplinary artist. Within the virtual worlds she creates, 3D embodiments of organisms borrow shapes, colours, and stories from plants and animals within our own world, while remaining singular. This conscious decision is intended to inspire a newly discovered appreciation of the endangered, non-human world that humanity often takes for granted as her portrayals seek to embody humankind’s seemingly objective and narrow misunderstanding of nature in this time of ecological crisis.
Born in Mexico City, Jorge L. Garcia is an artist and researcher working in the domains of recording, sound design and composition. Investigating memory, duration, and environment, his research is occupied with exploring the furthest, yet integral properties of sound phenomena. He creates soundscapes aiming to address the immersive capacity innate to the sound experience as a means of expanding horizons in sound technology and mediation. Jorge is currently completing a Bachelor of Digital Music at the University of Montreal (CA)
