MATTHEW ROY ARNOLD
AUDIO RECORDING OF TEXT
Notes from the Subsurface
Video by Charlie Tweed
Tech by Vasthu
This sculpture interrogates deep subsurface environments and the extremophiles that live within them to consider how they can function at extreme depths and pressure within challenging conditions such as highly acidic, high temperature, high radiation, low oxygen and methane heavy environments. Through sci-fi narratives, the twelve minute film exposes non-human and multi-species perspectives, hidden networks and unheard voices. Beginning with bird-eye view footage of the Burgess Shale in the Canadian Rockies. The second part of the film takes a science fictional approach; as the narrators firstly develop proposals for adapting humans to live in these extreme conditions, utilising a ‘Vision Space’ to adapt their perspectives and then employing designs for hybrid future lifeforms capable of living within these environments, with designs generated using an AI neural network.
