Timothy Weaver
Biological Narrative #7: Danaus
University of Denver
Summary
“Biological Narrative #7: Danaus” is a live cinema performance of a digital video | biological/proteomic music hybrid whose platform is built upon electronic translations derived from the protein-based sun compass of the migratory North American Monarch Butterfly. The work is elementally derived from the genotypic origins of this navigational system in combination with the phenotypic expressions that are exerted to fulfill an annual multigenerational journey across the North American continent from Canada to Mexico and back. The Danaus specie’s navigatory locative/visual protein complex mediates the lifeform’s relationship to color wavelength, as well as terrestrial and biological time. In the live cinema performance, the sonic equivalents of these locative proteins, are developed into a multi-layered audio score derived from genetic sequences of the blue, ultraviolet, and long wavelength opsin proteins found in the vision system of Danaus plexipus.
This sonic work is joined with the visual and light pattern characterizations of this migration consisting of video field recordings, time-lapse documentation of the organism’s migratory path, and virtual reality of the butterfly’s microscopic anatomy. The resulting work bends the sensibilities of the Danaus specie across multiple data scales to re-mediate the essential ties that all organisms have to journey, vulnerability and survival.
The performed version of the work brings the experimental hybridization of digital live cinema and performative bioinformatics into the form of “life cinema.” This subgenre of new media/digital cinematic performance builds upon the open-ended multimedia output of live cinema and the bending of biological computing, ecosemiotics and biomimicry to deliver speculative new media forms of ecological memory.
Extending the performance segment of this symposium presentation will be a discussion of the biological narrative that emerges from the enchainment of visual protein sequences to photoreceptor reactions to pattern recognition to locative/migratory expression and on to the broader roots and recognitions that compose and evolve ecological memory from light.
Biography
Timothy Weaver is a new media artist and former life scientist whose concerted objective has been to contribute to the restoration of ecological memory through the process of creative inquiry along the art | technology interface. Timothy’s recent projects have been featured at FILE/FILE Hipersonica (Brazil), transmediale.05, New Forms Festival (Vancouver), Korean Experimental Art Festival, Museum of Modern Art, Cuenca, Ecuador, Boston CyberArts, SIGGRAPH, the New York Digital Salon and the National Institutes of Health (Washington, DC). Weaver is currently Assistant Professor of eMAD and Director of the Digital Media Studies Graduate Program at the University of Denver, Denver, Colorado, USA.
Timothy’s research areas include emerging forms of narrativity, biomimetics, shared interactive space and sustainable design. Project activities are available at: http://lab.biotica.org and http://www.primamateria.org.