Sunshowers (2019) is a real-time animation artwork by Marija Avramovic and Sam Twidale.
Sunshowers is inspired by the opening chapter of Akira Kurosawa’s film Dreams which follows a young boy as he explores a forest and stumbles across a fox wedding. The artwork explores ideas of animism and techno-animism by assigning life in the form of artificial intelligence to all of the objects, both natural and man-made, within the virtual world. It unfolds in real time with the characters themselves deciding which paths they will follow.
In relation to this proposed exhibition, Sunshowers imagines a non-anthropocentric notion of the paradise garden. Inspired equally by the likes of Timothy Morton and Jane Bennett as well as ancient animistic belief systems, all objects in the virtual world of Sunshowers (from rocks, plants and animals to the falling rain) are given ludic consciousness in the form of shared neural-network minds. Everything has its own equally important other-intelligence.
It is apparent that our relationships with nonhumans has become the deciding factor for the fate of our humanity. It is therefore vital that we, like Morton, strive for ‘solidarity with nonhuman people’. The paradisiacal gardens of our imaginations are important sandboxes for this kind of thought – Sunshowers is a non-human child playing in the sand.
A bit about us:
Our collaborative practice is based on ideas of storytelling and play, myth and non-human intelligences – these themes mesh with ideas of ecology in our evoking of emergent intelligences, as well as notions of belief systems and simulated ecosystems.
We work across a number of mediums from painting and drawing to music and writing, as well as real-time animation. Our practice is playful and collaborative with projects growing from the scattered seeds of shared fascinations of fiction, film, video games, theory and the future.
We are scavengers of virtual worlds.
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