Nature is an event that never stops

Nature is an event that never stops, 2023
VR film, Oculus 2 VR goggles, projector
Duration: 15-30 mins (visitor dependent)

Installation views: PSM, Berlin
Photos: Marjorie Brunet-Plaza

Nature is an event that never stops (2023) is a film work, set in virtual reality, with interactive elements on colour perception. A narrator leads the visitor through the interactions in the film which is 15-40 minutes long, dependent on visitor interaction and attention.

The design of the film is centered around five different colour matching scenarios, which the visitor to the film encounters as they navigate through a sequence of digitally built worlds. Each colour matching scenario is designed to study a specific aspect of either colour perception from a top down cultural perception perspective or from a bottom up, neuro-scientific perspective.

While the film narrates six scenes from different perspectives - for example, of a microorganism or the largest ecosystem - users can actively engage with the film through their own navigation choices. Each scene in the film is designed as a so-called world, which offers the visitor to travel through different more-than-human perspectives in different environments. In one world the visitor is shrunk down to the perspective of a small insect walking under tall leaves of waving grass and leaves, looking up at a changing blue sky.

The film rejects the idea that nature is a collection of separated and isolated parts and highlights the consequences of human-centric decision making. The film questions aspects of human decision making, cultural knowledge and colour perception, through interactive colour matching scenarios, guided by the narrator in the film. The visitor’s colour match contributions are visualized in the final scene of the film, as long transmission chains of coloured spheres traveling through a large checkered cubic space, and simultaneously this scene of the film is live-streamed onto the wall of the exhibition space.

The film was developed in collaboration with the art-science project Experimenting, Experiencing, Reflecting (EER), which was founded in 2018 by artist Olafur Eliasson and anthropologist and cognitive scientist Prof. Andreas Roepstorff of Aarhus University, Denmark.