
ECTOPIA
a digital-interactive immersive art installation





WELCOME TO THE MOTHERSHIP ECTOPIA
Informed by Indigenous cosmologies and cyber-feminism viewed through a lens of transhumanism and land-based values of collective belonging, ECTOPIA reflects what it means to produce, to reproduce, to be native, creative, and innovative.
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Set on a meta-spaceship lost in deep space-time, visitors board the seemingly-abandoned vessel and unravel the story of the Captain, an Indigenous Futurist, whose logs explain her story and legacy as the lone survivor of an intergalactic mission to seed new life on a distant planet.
Combining multi-channel audio-visualS, 3D-projection and sculpture, digitaI interactivity, experimental storytelling, and embodied learning, Ectopia brings tradition and innovation together to expand the potential for art as emergence, and to engage engage the broader public in conversations around the interplay of nature and technology, as well as their role in planetary health and the future of life on Earth.
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Mission
Sent by the last survivors of a dying world, the Captain of the Mothership Ectopia, a terraforming world building machine, is an Indigenous Scientist chosen for her linguistic, bio-technic, and cultural fluidity. Her mission is to seed new life on a faraway planet. Entering the planet's orbit, attempting to pierce its atmospheric shell had triggered a massive countersurge of dark matter, causing heavy metals to be expelled from the planet's core, sparking a chain reaction of nuclear fission which froze the Spaceship's core generator and threw its systems offline.
Exposure to cosmic radiation from 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 Worldbuilder's energetic gridlines until Planet and Terraformer 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, there is no destination but everything can be accessed, every epoch inhabited.



Aborted
Just before touching down, the Mothership collides with an orbiting vessel and is knocked off course. Signals scramble then go offline and the Captain falls into hypersleep.
She wakes up reeling when ectopic life support systems fail, realizing her ship is adrift and she is alone on her Maiden Voyage .
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.



Planting Hope
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 unborn descendants by embedding her genetic code into the Mothership Vessel's organic, cybernetic structures, and operating systems.


CUTTING-EDGE MEDIA
ECTOPIA is a multi-media art exhibition that uses high-tech digital tools to create artscapes that examine trans-planetary Indigeneity and evolutionary futurism.

Featuring analogue and digital interactive zones, on-site and remote visitors can access exhibits, track their activity, save their progress, and add to memory of the ship, create logs, and share the hybrid forms created.


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
DIRECTOR'S STATEMENT



VISITOR EXPERIENCE

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.





CREATIVE VISION
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
An esoteric cultural history of botany, seed displacements and spore currents, mapping and mixing different accounts of movement, migration, and fragmentation, the Seed Vault is a time capsule and metaphor evoking the intrinsic collective longing for plants as living archives of the elementary connections that life can establish with the world.
The Vault contains local Indigenous plants and their Indigenous names as well as a Language Vault, where Earth’s Indigenous languages can be uploaded, preserved, and universally translate, becoming online repositories of cultural, ethnobotanical, and linguistic data.
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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






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.
Copyright Tooth & Nail Pictures, Ltd. All rights reserved.



