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)

News

Sound Studio Memberships

02/04/2024

We are currently accepting applications for new sound studio members. Send us a DM on instagram or email contact@worldcreation.studio for more information.

Composite #38

20/03/2024

World Creation Studio had the opportunity to participate in Composite #38 to talk about the CO/CREATE residency!

INVISIBLE Festival - Brussels

20/03/2024

This past March, two former CO/CREATE residents (Ahmed Drebika & Melannie Jonas-Ng) flew to Brussel’s INVISIBLE Festival to showcase the immersive VR artwork they created during the last edition of the residency. Click here if you want to learn more about last year’s CO/CREATE projects!

Local Spin- Odile Myrtil

13/03/2024

Join us next Wednesday from 6-9pm for our DJ workshop Local Spin hosted this month by Odile Myrtil!

Deep Listening Study Circle

13/02/2024

Exploring listening through different forms of movement, sound, and dreaming, Ludwig Berger will lead a study group on Tuesday evenings for practicing Deep Listening after the composer Pauline Oliveros. The workshop is now at full capacity, so stay tuned for other workshops and events to come!

Local Spin– Teykirisi

01/02/2024

Join us February 1, 6pm – 9pm for the first our first DJ workshop of the year hosted by Teykirisi. Limited to just 10 spots, so RSVP early to secure your place.

Open House - CO/CREATE Artist Residency

19/01/2024

Interested in visiting the space and meeting some of the artists involved in hosting the residency? Join us Friday, January 19th anytime between 2pm – 7pm.

Please note that World Creation Studio is located up 1 flight of stairs. Please contact us if mobility is a concern and we will do our best to accommodate.

Sound Production with Abelton Live

26/11/2023

Local Spin– Jordan Gardner

23/11/2023

Introduction to 3D Printing

25/11/2023

CKUT Sessions with Llena and Dayhills

24/10/2023

Artist Feature - Deidre

24/08/2022

CO/CREATE

15.04.23 – 13.05.23

CO/CREATE is an immersive exhibition bringing together the collaborative projects of nine emerging artists based in Tiohtià:ke/Montréal: Bianca Shonee Arroyo-Kreimes (Shonee), Bayleigh, Taoyu Chen (Riven), Ahmed Drebika, Jules Galbraith, Jorge Luis García González, Isaiah Iseghohi (Dayhills), Melannie Jonas-Ng, Vivian Li.

These artists explore the notion of worldbuilding through six immersive worlds that resulted from a group residency at World Creation Studio (WCS). Using virtual reality and spatialized audio, artists worked together to create distinct immersive experiences that challenge our perceptions of digital creation and reflect on what worldbuilding means in the present moment—here and now. But that here and now takes its social and political dimension, its relevance, from the present ecological moment, marked by hard evidence of climate change that coexists with a frantic desire to explore virtual and extra-planetary worlds (while large corporations co-opt terms like metaverse, billionaires invest in space exploration and consumers are invited to migrate their lives to computer-generated worlds or infinitely scroll through the void of social media). Engaging and reflecting on worldbuilding in this context seems a necessary endeavour, one that is not devoid of irony.

Yet, in the case of WCS, this process of imagining and creating synthetic worlds reflects the studio’s core interest in organizing a community art space that centres sharing resources (equipment, space, software) as well as ideas and knowledge. In short, worldbuilding to WCS is about a collective exploration into community building in the milieu of art, science, and technology in Montreal. As such, they created a unique residency model: the call invited applications from artists interested in potential collaboration through the creation of augmented, virtual and sound-based experiences; the residency consisted of intensive periods of production and learning, for example through workshops facilitated by WCS team members—a network of artists, designers and technologists with experience rooted in digital collaboration. With four months of access to WCS’ facilities, artists-in-residence participated in both formal and informal feedback sessions, getting to know each other, bouncing ideas back and forth, and familiarising themselves with each project; this process naturally led to skill-sharing and to the opportunity to work together as co-authors. This collaborative residency format had a direct impact on the conceptual and formal aspects of the six VR worlds that make up this show. Throughout the development of CO/CREATE, artists collectively imagined ways to untangle worldbuilding from the veils of colonialism and consumerism—facing the reality that in constructing a world, one must consider the histories and narratives that came before it.

Through personal interpretations and narratives of worldbuilding, the CO/CREATE exhibition invites visitors to dive into six speculative spaces. Audiences will find a diversity of life, environments, and stories that reflect the diversity of the artists themselves—their backgrounds, interests and unique perspectives on the world they live in and the worlds they envision. These VR projects invite us to reflect on interconnectedness, kinship, relationships beyond anthropocentric perspectives and the antagonism that emerges as we interact with others and navigate differences of class, race, sexual orientations, and faith. Some of the characters, soundscapes, and imaginaries presented within the exhibition connect to identities and ideas that do not yet have a space in this world, and therefore remind us of the political and technological constructs that define our experiences of the here, now, and beyond.

Exhibition text written by Erandy Vergara

LUCA

Sound Studio Memberships

Composite #38

INVISIBLE Festival - Brussels

Local Spin- Odile Myrtil

Deep Listening Study Circle

Local Spin– Teykirisi

Open House - CO/CREATE Artist Residency

Sound Production with Abelton Live

Local Spin– Jordan Gardner

Introduction to 3D Printing

CKUT Sessions with Llena and Dayhills

Artist Feature - Deidre

We are a non-profit organization that aims to strengthen creative communities in Montreal by providing accessible studio space, creative mentorships, skill-building workshops, exhibition opportunities and digital media resources and tools.

CO/CREATE

LUCA

No More Evil

The Wind Spoke Nothing I Could Know

Jumbies Echo

Object A

Hills Universe