Project: Land-Escape and The Aura of Distance
Artist: Arden Bendler Browning (with programming by Matt Browning and sound composition by Phil Calato)
Co-Curators: Jonell Logan, Hannah Barco
Booth 114

Land-escape and the Aura of Distance is a multi-faceted digital installation using projectors, colored light, Mixed Reality headsets, sound, and physical paintings.

Visitors will be able to explore a series of interactive abstract digital landscapes created by Bendler Browning in an ever-changing journey through virtual worlds. These imaginary spaces are inspired by plein air drawings made while moving through real world travels, and studio painted impressions of shelters and vistas.

Donning a Mixed Reality headset, viewers will see their real world surroundings as well as gesturally painted virtual environments existing only within the headset. Visitors are presented with the opportunity to move through vibrant, immersive painterly environments while walking only steps within the exhibition space. The series of Mixed Reality environments offer a range of experiences, movements and viewpoints which offer agency into how much of any one place or time is possible to be seen or navigated. Environments include : windows revealing slowly drifting landscape paintings, with expanded gestures only visible through the window frames; a painting that has become the entire space of the floor and grown upward to resemble a jungle of painted marks which disappear when a visitor moves through them; a series of paintings which grow beyond their edges when an individual walks close to them; a painting growing downward from the ceiling, wondering whether the world makes any sense at all.

Within the physical environment but also visible through the headsets, visitors also encounter a series of large and small animated projections. The projections are the result of a live computer program which merges physical and virtual paintings and relays a fluid travelogue through an endless evolution of imagery. The two screens offer dual views of the same route marked by painting landmarks, but one view is a forward motion while the other is a reverse. While each individual has a personalized experience within their own headset, they can see other visitors also wearing a headset and moving through their own unique path. Participants simultaneously experience a communal space while sectioned away from each other, akin to virtual meetings and online interactions.

A pulsating soundtrack composed of natural and mechanical rhythms moves along with the projections and Mixed Reality environments. Birdsong, wind, footsteps, traffic, mixed with background punctuation from familiar artificial noise connects the installation to a hybrid sense of indoor/outdoor and organic/artificial. As the digital age and artificial intelligence continue to grow while the natural environment is threatened by climate change, this installation alludes to questions of what future landscape may be.