Text by CLOT Magazine
Realtime is a rotating showcase running until 3 September 2023, presenting various artists using boundary-pushing technologies. Housed within Nxt Museum’s biggest space Nxt Stage, the digital artworks are presented to visualise the context in which today’s makers ignite tomorrow’s art movements. Curated by Charlotte Kent and Jesse Damiani, with new works presented seasonally, Realtime responds to the rapidly evolving pace of digital technology, featuring artists with their fingers on the pulse of progress to offer fresh perspectives on innovation.
The first iteration – Realtime ‘Lilypads: Mediating Exponential Systems’ – presents the work of three artists: Amelia Winger Bearskin, Libby Heaney and Entangled Others Studio with Robert M. Thomas. ‘Lilypads: Mediating Exponential Systems’ proposes the multiple ways of thinking about the lilypad as a way to move through various perspectives on our world: our ecologies, technologies, cultures, and economics.
In her project TO BODY, Amelia Winger Bearskin, she uses AI to erase all human-made structures from urban landscapes, exposing the flaws in our visible and invisible visual infrastructures. Through a poetic narrative and AI animation, she encourages us to explore new ways of perceiving beyond the given norms we have internalised.
In Libby Heaney‘s piece, Q is for Climate (?), the artist explores quantum computing possibilities by drawing from interviews the artist conducted with scientists at leading tech companies–as well as her own speculations around the radical potential of quantum computing. Realtime curator and Scholar-in-Residence Charlotte Kent says, Heaney creates a visual language that allows us to glimpse the possibilities of this alternate way of being, of knowing. Quantum computing does not depend on the binary language of ones and zeros, but a kind of movement that leads her to describe the code like a musical score. We see but we also hear in new ways, our expectations reformed.
Lastly, Decohering Delineation, from Entangled Others showcases the entanglement of neural networks and oceanic data as an experimental exploration to show the innate interconnected nature of ecosystems and specimens, artificial and natural. Entangled Others challenges the perception of technology as separate from organic life and opens new, crucial ways of reimagining ourselves as part of the more-than-human.
