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Sowing Seeds
Hailey Guzik
Fili 周 Gibbons
Noah Sherrin
Challenging the notion of the garden as a place of purity and an object of human control, Sowing Seeds reimagines and reposits the garden within a speculative future where bio-technical convergence has dissolved boundaries between humans, technology, and Nature. By cultivating a half-wild garden and hybrid space filled with both animacy and speculative botanical forms the artists disrupt the illusion of the garden as a pristine natural space to be conserved. Instead, Sowing Seeds takes into account understandings of the world beyond strictly human notions of life, time, and experience and in doing so make apparent the entanglements between the natural and the artificial.
Sowing Seeds formed through collaborative experiments on care, visual research, sharing of fragments of text, and technical experimentation. AI image generation creatively informed and provided with artistic representations of plants and environmental data to generate new hypothetical forms of life. These newly generated plants were then reimagined and translated into the 3D botanical forms that populate the garden.
As visitors explore, the garden generates a dynamic soundscape – co-created in dialogue with more-than-human notions of time through spectral morphing of longform collective improvisations of text recitations and field recordings. Visitors encounter both visually and sonically chimeric interactions between speculative organisms calling into question the experiential nature of time – where the machinic, botanical, and human notions of temporality do not always align. Through altered forms of time, scale, and experience, Sowing Seeds disorients and welcomes – inviting participants to arrive as they are.
sowing seeds
a peony returns
alien pink roots thrusting through bare soil
the fennel self-seeds
a rhizome as subterranean stem
the vicissitudes of nourishment
Hailey Guzik is a multidisciplinary artist based in Tiohti:áke / Mooniyang / Montréal, QC. Their artistic practice branches the space between immersive installations and digital media, stemming off a series of plein-air digital installation artworks. Their recent work uses digital environments as a tool for evoking critical reflections on the nature of perception and memory. Through their spatially evolving landscapes, the virtual blends into transient forms of the “natural”, manifesting as a contemplation on the relationships between digital media, natural ecologies, and a global environment under climate crisis.
Fili 周 Gibbons (we/they/them) are a musician and sound engineer of mixed Chinese and Canadian ancestry based in Tiohtià:ke / Montreal. Their artistic practice is a synthesis of cello performance, audio creation, embodiment, and traditional memory systems — employing these as potencies for the expression of plural identities, and the transmission of cultural memory.
Noah Sherrin is a composer and sound artist from a small island on the west coast of Canada, now based in Montréal (Tiohti:áke, Mooniyang). His work spans music and sound design for linear and interactive media, experimental music releases, site-specific sound installations, digital lutherie, and location-based recording projects.
