Resonance features a digital universe contained with a single drop of water. It juxtaposes notions of virtuality, potentiality, and mnidoo-consciousnessing in relation to micro and macro interrelationality. This hydrosphere contains seven spherical ‘story planets’. Each has its own unique soundtrack and original performances by microscopic water organisms such as protozoa, rotifers, ciliates and diatoms living in the St. Lawrence River. Participants interactively choose their own explorative pathway to glide through liquid star-filled constellations, fly around planets, and penetrate microscopic worlds, where reality expands infinitesimally.  This work draws from an Anishinaabe creation story, about 7 powerful beings (helpers/teachers) that emerged from the water and later formed our clan system.

Resonance in a 3-D environment created Unreal Engine, designed as a virtual reality experience in Oculus Meta, but also exhibited as a projection dome and wall projection. Participants enter what appears as a watery blue solar system, populated with seven dynamic and colourful planets of various sizes, and an ambient soundscape featuring underwater sounds. The planets spawn in different locations and sizes each time the program is rebooted. Each planet is created from an original video of microscopic organisms found in water samples drawn from the Bateau Chanel, a marshy area of the St. Laurence River. These are edited and colorized in Premiere Pro, and rendered into spheres in Unreal engine. Each planet has its own unique spatially located audio soundscape that participants hear as they approach and enter the planet. This is free flying experience, navigatable with head movements and handheld controllers. A projection version of Resonance (00:06:12 ) was created by recording a cinematic ‘fly-through’ of the environment in Unreal Engine that features the overall space as well as each of the seven planets and their soundscapes. This can be projected in a dome (with TouchDesigner), a room or on a wall. We often include a video microscope, with a monitor, microscope stains, and samples of wild water, as a physical interactive element.  There are several variations in how we install this work, depending on the exhibition context. Some installations also include the 5-minute video Water is Alive, which offers a lay summary of the project and its three artworks, Resonance, Gathering, and Emerging from the Water. 

Unreal Build by Jorge de Oliveira and M. Pnakenova.

Unreal cinematography by Galit Ariel.

Projection Mapping by Christina Dovolis.

In this non- linear and multi-vocal story, viewers explore a microscopic universe, contained in a drop of water. Both an art work and a virtual gallery, this work gathers eight story planets featuring found images of micro-organisms- five by Manning and Bunch and two commissioned story planets, including Creation Story, by Mariel Belanger, Water is Alive by Hodari Newtown, Mona Stonefish and Lydia Johnson. This multiplicity instantiates Manning’s theory of mnidoo worlding, a phenomenological extrapolation of relational ontologies shared by many Indigenous peoples of the Americas. That is, existence is comprised of an entanglement of animate, dynamic potencies, known as mnidoo in Anishinaabemowin. As Manning puts it “Water, Niibii, is life… These microbial worlds, teeming with living protozoa, plankton, bacteria and algae, are mnidoo. Spirit, potency, potential, process, energy - mnidoo expresses that which is simultaneously happening and about to take place as emergent possibility.  Life and all of existence, in Anishinaabe philosophies, are taken up as a dynamic, interrelational process, composed of interacting potencies. Mortal, finite singularities comingle with the flocking wave of the infinite. Appearing as shear potentiality, the formative dimension of the real, mnidoo alters conditions of possibility, bringing worlds into being.”

The world for “gathering” was created in Unreal Engine, with planets created using found images and videos of microscopic organisms rendered into spheres. The artists curated three storyplanets, including ‘Creation Story’ by PhD candidate Mariel Belanger, ‘Water is Alive’ by MA students Hodari Newtown and Lydia Johnson, featuring Elder Mona Stonefish, and ‘Ship’s Ballast’ by Mary Bunch.

Unreal Build by Jorge de Oliveira and M. Pnakenova. Unreal cinematography and interaction design by Christina Dovalis.