Alinta Krauth
Interview by Kiran Gurung, Colloquium Manager
Interview by Kiran Gurung, Colloquium Manager
Alinta Krauth
Alinta's mobile app 'Diffraction' (2019) asks how environmental scientists, and the general public, can engage differently with the outdoors at night time
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Kiran Gurung: Can you tell us a bit about your work, and how you incorporate your interests in the environment and ecology? Alinta Krauth: I suppose I would call myself a tinkerer across a range of digital and mixed-media art forms, including mixed reality, locative art, animation, sound, interaction and art games. I often combine these digital elements as forms of science communication or data visualization. Where I live, I am lucky to be in the presence of wildlife despite that wildlife declining at the fastest rate ever recorded. Several years ago, I began volunteering as a mammal surveyor for a local university. This got me thinking about how I could represent the wildlife of my area: the human-nonhuman meeting points, inter-species communication, ecological networks, and environmental systems that I see around me through human-computer interaction. |
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Kiran Gurung: What led you to incorporate audio elements into your artwork? Alinta Krauth: Experimenting with sound was what made me interested in being an artist. The physical principles of the soundwave, its effect on objects and natural processes, its strange uses in warfare, and how the brain is able to cross-wire hearing with other senses through synesthesia, are some of the many intriguing aspects about sound’s relationship with the environment and the human body that interest me. These are the concepts that originally drew me into the connection between the arts and the sciences. More recently, through my interest in ecology, I’ve been experimenting with using galvanic skin response sensors to gather data from plants and fungi in order to turn this into sound and visuals in real-time. It’s quite nice to feel like one is having a conversation with a plant through an audio/visual display! |
Under-Mine Collection, an interactive SciArt Solo Exhibition
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Kiran Gurung: Can you talk a bit about EphemerLab?
Alinta Krauth: EphemerLab is a new artist collective, which I run with my partner Dr. Jason Nelson. He is also an artist, and a professor of digital writing and digital poetics. Together we have run our own festivals and collaborate on a lot of great commissioned projects, particularly for public light festivals. Before Covid-19, night-time outdoor art festivals were very popular here in Australia. The next project EphemerLab was working on (which was sadly cancelled due to social distancing requirements), was an interactive projection mapping of two giant whale sculptures outside a natural history museum, showing how microplastics can enter their systems through accidental ingestion, purposeful ingestion, or the food chain.
Alinta Krauth: EphemerLab is a new artist collective, which I run with my partner Dr. Jason Nelson. He is also an artist, and a professor of digital writing and digital poetics. Together we have run our own festivals and collaborate on a lot of great commissioned projects, particularly for public light festivals. Before Covid-19, night-time outdoor art festivals were very popular here in Australia. The next project EphemerLab was working on (which was sadly cancelled due to social distancing requirements), was an interactive projection mapping of two giant whale sculptures outside a natural history museum, showing how microplastics can enter their systems through accidental ingestion, purposeful ingestion, or the food chain.
Kiran Gurung: Are you working on anything right now that you'd like to share?
Alinta Krauth: Sure! One of my most recent works is an interactive app for use by citizen scientists, life scientists, and other naturalists and nature lovers. The app is called Diffraction, and questions what happens when absurdist creativity and postmodernist thought is injected during fieldwork. It takes inspiration from the Situationist International movement of the 1950s-70s who proposed the concept of Dérive (to drift) as a way of interacting differently with one’s environment. You can see work in progress shots of it here, and it will be available on app stores in the future.
The 'Diffraction' app is meant for the outdoors, but here a gallery-friendly version is created for showing at The Glucksman Gallery in Cork, Ireland.
Learn more about Alinta Krauth's work on her website
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