This experience is set on the snow- covered slopes of Edmonton’s North Saskatchewan River Valley. A riparian, parkland, ecosystem containing numerous biomes, this valley runs throughout the city. Instead of privatization and development, it was preserved by earlier generations as a Commons – an Edmonton-specific, visionary model of sustainable respect for the environment. Like the rest of the world’s ecologies, this Commons is currently under threat from a socio-political economy that artificially divides nature from human culture.
Art can make space for collective contemplation, dialogue, and deeper understanding of these relationships. First reflecting, then shaping the world, it can create community, present ideas, question assumptions, and help imagine possible futures. It can examine the dominance of human exceptionalism, and our worldview of humanity in the context of nature.
Xpainting provides an experience of this Commons dynamically modified by the mediated presence and actions of its viewers, concretely demonstrating human influences on the circular economy of nature, and provoking questions/thought about this reality.
It is a meditation weaving together many themes: human presence in, and response to, nature; nature’s response to us; quantum underpinnings of reality; and our river valley as an emblem of climate change/impact.
We like to look at nature, but we seldom think about nature looking back at us, or about how all living organisms interactively affect each other in our Gaiian world.