ECTOPIA
A digital-interactive immersive art installation
The Story
Sent by the last survivors of a dying world , the Captain of the Mothership Ectopia terraforming world building machine, is an Indigenous Scientist chosen for her mastery of languages gafrden, bio-tech, and culture. and her crew failed in its mission to seed new life on a faraway planet. Attempting to pierce its atmospheric shell had triggered a massive countersurge of dark matter and heavy metals to be expelled from the planet's core, sparking a chain reaction of nuclear fission events which melted the spaceship's core generator and threw its systems offline.
Exposure it to the cosmic radiation caused by the blast created a magnetic ionosphere around the vessel that pulled it into the gravitational field of the planet and sucked it into its molten core. This anti-matter meltdown caused the planet to collapse inward on itself, folding time and compressing space in eclipsing the Spaceship's vectorial and geometric proprioception and dismantling the Terraformer Worldbuilder's energetic gridlines until Planet and Worldbuilder became entangled and indistinguishable from one another.
In their quantum superposition, new possibilities for form and existence came into being -- for motion, body, and distance. Having tunnelled into the centre of the planet , the Mothership was now the cosmic crankshaft , the rod turning the wheel of the universe, the fulcrum upon which galaxies spin, the Axis Mythos running through the entire story, the point at which every place is immediate. Where all points are equidistant yet there is no distance between them at all. At this point, there is no destination but everything can be reached, every epoch inhabited. In what was a thousand years if it was a day, the Mothership Ectopia was spat out into the ether. The pressure from the stacked interface caused the Captain and her crew to fall into deep-space hypersleep almost immediately. But upon waking, the Captain realizes she has been asleep for over a thousand years while her ship drifts . And she also realizes she is alone , her crew vanished without a trace.
Suddenly painfully aware that she holds the fate of her entire home planet in her hands, the Indigenous Scientist is determined to survive long enough so find a solution. She embarks on an experiment of hope and love for her unborn descendants by infusing her genetic ma terial within the ship's organic and cybernetic structures, whose coding has been embedded within the vessel's latent operating systems.
Ectopia is a female Indigenous-led collective reflection of what it means to produce and reproduce, to be native, creative, and innovative. Ectopia is informed by Indigenous ontology, futurism, and intersectional queer cyber-feminism, and is viewed through a lens of transhumanism and land-based notions of belonging.
Set in a Meta-Spaceship built out of a level-entry art gallery or dedicated exhibition space in Victoria’s arts district, and hosted with in association with MAVN Network, the Ectopia exhibition will involve multi-screen immersive installations, 3D projection mapping, filmic/holographic loops, and sculpture. It will bring together digital and natural worlds through queer feminist symbolism; timelapses; digital, virtual, and analog film; AI-generated art; special effects; and organic materialities. It posits accessible public art as hybridized between earth-based and technological.
Viewers will “board” a seemingly-abandoned spaceship and start to unravel the story of the Scientist, an Indigenous futurist, whose video-logs explain her story and legacy as the lone survivor of an intergalactic mission to carry the potential for life to a faraway planet. Through the video loop, her story unfolds: Reeling from an ectopic pregnancy which prevents her from carrying children, the Scientist embarks on an experiment of hope and love for her future descendants by turning to the ship’s Indigenous Seed Vault and implanting her embryos within the plant systems whose genetic material is stowed aboard her spaceship.
The Futurists
The Experience
ECTOPIA is an immersive, digitally-interactive, multi-media art exhibition that examines trans-planetary Indigeneity and evolutionary futurism. We will blend 3D projection mapping, augmented reality, generative art, multi-channel audio and video loops, 360VR, sound-responsive lighting, painting, welding, sculpture, and set design to achieve our vision.
USER EXPERIENCE: a mix of high-tech immersive artscapes and lo-fi digital and interactive zones. On-site 3D mapping and printing will allow viewers to create and add to our sculptural hybrid forms. All brought to you by a team of experienced:
-Indigenous plant and permaculture experts
-Indigenous cultural consultants
-Indigenous language specialists
-Indigenous-led digi-tech experts
- Cyber-feminist media artists
Projection Mapping
Powerful projections of generative digital art combine with motion-sensitive light and sound displays to offer viewers an interactive and immersive experience.
"By way of backstory, in 2023 I survived a serious ectopic pregnancy, and during my convalescence, somewhere between the terms which encompass life and death, I conceived “Ectopia,” coined from the Greek ektopos meaning "away from a place, distant; foreign, strange.” Indigenous world views and origin stories are not exclusively Earthbound; they also feature pronounced metaphysical and astrological aspects, such as interstellar travel and communication, transhuman kinship, hybridization, transmogrification, shape-shifting, and the folding of space and time. Technology is not antithetical to Indigeneity; however, Indigenous people have typically been under-represented in works of speculative fiction. Embracing “new technologies” within the context of traditional knowledge and Indigenous cosmology, Ectopia places itself at the forefront of key discussions of our times, in which identity processes, ecology, indigeneity, transhumanism and biopolitics are interdependent and complementary. It considers the representation of beings and their metamorphoses, the relationship between individuals and technologies, and the connection between bodies and the Earth." - Eva Grant, creative director
The Story
Ectopia, an immersive, feminist, and Indigenous futuristic project, takes place aboard an abandoned spaceship carrying life to a faraway planet where an Indigenous Scientist, unable to bear children of her own, embarks on an experiment of hope and love for her future descendants by implanting her embryos within the plant systems whose genetic material is stowed on board.
Viewers will watch the archived captain's logs, explore the exhibit, and interact with both the digital interfaes and the hybrid beings created in realtime through generative technology, who have now evolved as techno-human-plant hybrids.
Through a series of virtual, sculptural, 3D mapping; film, projection, audio tracks; sound, movement, and light-receptive components; and interactive digital programs, we learn that the Futurist has uploaded her consciousness to the ship to watch over her creations as she considers her enduring Indigeneity from an interstellar vantage point that transcends Earth-based notions of Home.
the seed vault.
The installation will include a Seed Vault containing local Indigenous plants along with their Indigenous names as well as a Language Vault, where Earth’s Indigenous languages can be uploaded, preserved, and universally translated. Both these elements have virtual and enduring spinoffs by means of online repositories of cultural, ethnobotanical, and linguistic data, preserved for the future. These components could be made available to cultural, ecological, and language conservationists to use for their actual data and be made available to the public for research, information, and identification - think "plant snap" for IDing plants. Could be done for languages and cultural artifacts as well.
We are excited to be partnering with The Blossoming Place/PEPAKEṈ HÁUTW̱ and the Tribal School to create this seed vault and ensure i lives on beyond Ectopia.
The seed vault as a time capsule and metaphor evokes the intrinsic collective longing for plants as living archives of the elementary connections that life can establish with the world. Esoteric cultural history of botany, seed displacements and spore currents, mapping and mixing different accounts of movement, migration, and fragmentation. You can see photos of previous The Blossoming Place/PEPAKEṈ HÁUTW̱ projects below (with credit to the org).
Cyberfeminism, UX & IA
Reproductive technology, hybridization, recombinations, cloning, grafting, stems, incubation, cybergenesis and cybergenetics, biohacking
Community Engagement & Ecology
Local, eco-friendly, sovereign and sustainable storytelling
Post Natural Studies and Indigenous Knowledge Systems
Futurism, protopias, networks, open source knowledge and sharing, experimentation
Theme: Science
Key Words:
-Technology, artificial intelligence, quantum physics; cyber-genetics, cyber-genesis
-Interstellar travel, astronomy; off-world exploration, space-time
-Medicine, biohacking, stem cells; genetics,
Theme: Nature
Key words:
-Evolution, adaptation, viability, resilience
-Reproduction, recombination, cloning, grafting, hybridization; alchemy, synergy,
Theme: Humanity and Transhumanism
Key words:
-Compassion, love, empathy, connection, harmony
-Intelligence, design, divinity, spirituality,
-Biopolitics, equality, morality, law & ethics, agency, autonomy
-Family, progeny, forebears, descendants, ancestors, birth, death, renewal; new frontiers
Theme: Communications
Key words:
-Harmonics, harmonic resonance, amplification, hybridization
-Multi-channel frequencies; broadcast seeding and transmission
Theme: Culture
Key words: shape-shifting; time bending; art, storytelling, music, language, textiles; fabric of cosmos, imagination, creativity, patterning, inspiration, dreaming; new frontiers
Interactive Key Words
Green Gazing: 360 Projection and Movement Experience / Installation from Ectopia Creative Developer and Technical Lead, Lesley Marshall
"An immersive multimedia participatory movement exchange using sound, image and botanicals. In a room of plants, the viewers / participants experience guided movement prompts from a pre-recording or with a guide amidst ambient sound and video rooted in ecological elements. Surround sound and multi-walled projections are altered using bio data from plants in the room. The ambient electronic sound and videoscape becomes a co-creation between plant, participant and artist. "
Previous work from STO:LO AR/3D/interactive digital artist JOSH CONRAD @ Slow Studies Creative
Art and Design
Archive and Textiles
Music and Language
Developed with the support of Creative BC and the British Columbia Arts Council. We gratefully acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts.
Designs, prototypes, art, and videos copyright 2026 by Tooth & Nail Pictures, Ltd. All rights reserved.
