As Above, So Below

Presented at QUT Art Museum, As Above, So Below brings together works by artists from across Australia and the world as part of the creative program for the International Symposium on Electronic Art (ISEA).

The symposium includes scholars, artists, and scientists to explore the intersections of art, science, and technology. First held in 1988, the program has since become one of the most significant forums for exchanging ideas and presenting cutting-edge work in electronic art and related fields. Taking place in Australia for the first time since 2013, this presents the important opportunity to showcase Australian artists making works that straddle these ever-evolving fields, placing them in conversation with international peers and collaborators.

QUT has delivered an up-to-the-minute exhibition that fills its gallery space with artworks that deploy technology in myriad, often interactive, ways—all linking the viewer back to more earthly questions of ecological systems and sustainability. Curator Katherine Dionysius explains that the title As Above, So Below, “is commonly used to describe the idea that the microcosm mirrors the macrocosm and vice versa. Many historians considered it a reference to the supposed effects of celestial mechanics upon terrestrial events, such the sun on the change of seasons, or the impact of the moon on the tides.” She continues, “considering the current climate crisis, in which we are seeing seemingly minute changes in temperature and sea levels threaten catastrophic changes to the broader ecosystem, ‘as above, so below’ becomes a warning.”

It is a topic perfectly suited to artists whose practices engage with scientific processes and new technologies, as well as to scientists seeking to contextualise and create visuals that can mediate the importance of their work to audiences. Across the exhibition, the most successful artworks are those which create this mediated space in ways that allow the viewer to really feel a connection to our ecological systems. Brisbane-based artist Ross Manning and architect, artist, and researcher Dr. Anna Tweeddale manage this by combining Manning’s signature use of self-governing kinetic objects with Tweeddale’s background in the built environment to create A Cycle of Air: Site 1, 2024. The work is born out of a residency co-supported by QUT, catalysed by not only the COVID pandemic but also the escalating frequency of wildfires in a warming world. Its rhythmic, inflating form, coupled with its practical application as a real-time air filtration device, bring the artists’ questions around the ethics of the air we breathe effectively to life.

While this artwork makes the invisible (air) visible, another work in the exhibition immerses the viewer into entirely alternative ways of seeing. Tully Arnot’s VR artwork Epiphytes, 2022, is a wonderful example of the potential of virtual reality to create new viewing experiences that feel genuinely enhanced by the technology. As the viewer puts on the headset, they are transported into Arnot’s childhood garden, the artist’s voice settling them into the space in the manner of a guided meditation. Finding calm in the magenta-hued space, a kind of plant-eye view on the world, the depth of the work unfolds. Using spatially controlled audio, the work includes interviews with evolutionary ecologist Monica Gagliano, acoustic archaeologist Umashankar Manthravadi, and echolocation teacher / blind researcher and activist Thomas Tajo alongside birdsong, field recordings, and fabricated sounds that evoke flowing water or perhaps the flow of life through the surrounding trees. As the saturated colour of the viewer’s 360 degree surroundings shift through an otherworldly, acid-tinged palette, the idea of seeing our world in a different, new frequency and the potential that this may yield is beautifully inescapable.

If the aesthetics of Arnot’s world are a collision of painterly colour theory and new tech, two other works in the exhibition take an entirely different approach to the aesthetics of technology. French artist duo Xenoangel (Marija Avramovic and Sam Twidale) have created Soft Waters, 2024, an explorable world across three-channels that looks and feels like an early PC adventure game. Playing as the shape-shifting Water Goddess, the user explores the terrain across three different time periods, encountering a cast of characters complete with popup dialogue. Soft Waters is a compelling interactive that clearly raises questions about non-linear time and the alternate time scales at play across both the natural and spiritual realms.

Similarly retro in appearance is the graphic treatment found in Tamiko Thiel’s Elemental Spaces, 2024, VR artwork. This interactive work invites the viewer to take part in the birth of our universe by triggering the release of the core elements that create conditions for life. From the void, the viewer’s surroundings are flooded with graphics reminiscent of a high school chemistry textbook. Each familiar molecule—CO2, CH4, O2, H2O—playing its part in a building complexity that will ultimately sustain us.

Elemental Spaces as an engagingly playable artwork is a tidy summary of an exhibition that examines how the seemingly small relates to the unfathomably large, and that what is happening at the micro level is often neatly replicated in the macro and across time. We may find much beauty within this, but as the realities of climate change (and other threats) become ever more apparent we must also see warnings. As Above, So Below in its best moments invites viewers to connect directly with these systems, to see them in their complexity and beauty through the eyes of artists using various models of time-driven artmaking. This is beautifully captured in Robert Andrew’s between language and country II, 2024, showing the way “the land both informs and records lived experiences.” Saltwater slowly drips from a machine above, over the course of the exhibition it creates and erases a written word in Yawuru Ngang-na, the artists ancestral tongue, “Buru—everything around you that you can see from the earth to the sky and also time.”

This review was originally published in Artist Profile, issue 68

EXHIBITION 
As Above, So Below
23 June – 13 October 2024
QUT Art Museum, Brisbane