Invisible Flock is an interactive arts studio based in Leeds, making ground breaking public and digital artworks. Drawing directly from the world around us, their mission is to create and foster relevant and contemporary art practices that have a long lasting transformative effect.
In the past couple of weeks, Invisible Flock gang were in Indonesia—exploring Java and Flores—for a collaboration with Digital Nativ, a digital fabrication and rapid prototyping studio whose projects center around the adoption of technology as a medium.
This collaborative work is titled Nada Bumi and has been exhibited on November 18 and 19, 2017 at Lawangwangi Creative Space, Bandung for Digital Design Weekend: Bandung Remix.
To know more about Invisible Flock, their collaboration with Digital Nativ, Nada Bumi, to the fusing of arts and technology, we sat and talked with Technical Director Ben Eaton.
On Nada Bumi
“It’s a brand new collaboration between us and Digital Nativ. We worked together last year, but it was more of a response. For this year, it’s a full collaboration to make a project from scratch.
The idea of Nada Bumi is to explore some of the really, kind of unique natural phenomenon or ecosystems in Indonesia, both the variety and kind of their extreme nature.
So we spent ten days exploring twelve or so different locations around Java and Flores. And in each location we captured large amounts of sounds, physical samples, we’ve collected soil, rock, water, a lot of photography, a lot of images, and also biodatas using sensors and electrical circuits to capture sounds that maybe you don’t hear—imperceptible sounds that plants make or small sounds happening under the earth.
Then we collaged it all together into a new sound and object installation where we kind of tried to interpret or recreate those environments in a large collage for people to experience A lot of what we’re doing is threading a line between the man-made, and the mechanical, as well as the natural and finding a place where they meet.
The work’s very much about the fragility of all these ecosystems, these incredibly beautiful but fragile pieces of nature all around Indonesia, and how man’s intervention and the relationship with that. So we’re sort of looking at synthesized nature as much as anything I suppose.”
On choosing Indonesian landscape as the work’s centerfold
“I think the single most important subject in the world at the moment is climate change. I think any other subject sits underneath it in terms of importance. If we don’t find a solution or address climate change like adults, then nothing else is really as important.
We won’t be around to worry about anything else. Therefore Indonesia is a really interesting place because I think all of its relationship to its environment, there’s a lot of politics and money, and interesting complications. So we want to look at what it meant to have a country that’s so diverse and so vast, and in many ways is at the forefront of climate change.
Bits of Indonesia is already under water, as you know, and there’s going to be even more so. So I think for us it was about how do we start addressing that. So what we’re trying to do is to suggest and look at people’s relationship to their environment, and how they participate in it, and perceive it, and how we can capture, represent, and therefore maintain those environments. We’re trying to have a conversation about that.”
