Connective Tissue and Bacterial Echoes: Four Artists, a River, and an Artificial Agent

Body as Border: Traces and Flows of Connection (2022) is an immersive, large-scale generative site-specific video projection that responds to notions of cellular traces and legacies.The piece was commissioned by the Surrey Art Gallery and installed as the final artwork for their decade-long project, UrbanScreen. Located at the Chuck Bailey Recreation Center in Surrey B.C. Canada, the artwork was visible from sunset to midnight from February 10th to May 1st, 2022. The artwork is a collaborative effort between the artists, the Fraser River, and custom-built computational systems. Developed in response to the global COVID-19 crisis and the ways that human bodies occupy bordered spaces, the research reflects on the ways that the virus has colonized countless human bodies across the world. Under
pandemic conditions, human bodies are objects of state and bio-capitalist interest, where the macrocosm of global geopolitics and the smallest of all microbes intervenes and entwines with one another. In this way, the body has become both a statistic and a borderland space for the meeting of macro and microorganisms