A digital-interactive & immersive art installation
ECTOPIA
The Futurists
Informed by Indigenous cosmologies and cyber-feminism viewed through a lens of transhumanism and land-based notions of belonging, ECTOPIA is a collective reflection of what it means to produce and reproduce, to be native, creative, and innovative.
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Set on a meta-spaceship lost in deep space-time. viewers board the seemingly-abandoned vessel and unravel the story of the Scientist, an Indigenous Futurist, whose logs explain her story and legacy as the lone survivor of an intergalactic mission to carry the potential for life to a faraway planet.
Combining multi-channel audio-visual immersivity, 3D projection and sculpture, game-based digital 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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The Mission
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.
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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.
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The Story
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​Reeling from an ectopic pregnancy which prevents her from carrying children, the Scientist turns to the ship’s Indigenous Seed Vault and implanting her embryos within the plant systems whose genetic material is stowed aboard her spaceship.
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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.
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The Experience
ECTOPIA is an immersive, digitally-interactive, multi-media art exhibition that examines trans-planetary Indigeneity and evolutionary futurism.
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.
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.
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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the seed vault
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.
Designs, prototypes, art, and videos copyright 2026 by Tooth & Nail Pictures, Ltd. All rights reserved.
