The installation begins outside with two monitors facing the street of CREATE Gallery showing amoeba-like shapes in deep shades of blue and purple. As you make your way into the gallery’s main floor, you get the feeling you’re entering another world. Projected images are situated in the form of a triangle, and a dynamic soundscape fills the space. This carefully constructed set-up offers a rare and intimate look at insects, plants, small critters, and forest animals interacting with technical devices in natural environments.
“Our Non-Understanding of Everything” is a multi-channel video installation by the Hudson Valley-based collaboration eteam (Franziska Lamprecht and Hajoe Moderegger); it’s co-organized by CREATE Council on the Arts and Wave Farm. Comprising multiple screens and a total of 16 videos, rotating each week, the work creates a visually and sonically immersive environment exploring the possibility of care, contemplation, and interconnection between humans, non-human animals, technologies, and our shared environments.
The work transpired during the Covid-19 lockdown, a period in which the time spent online escalated for many of us, and parks, forests, and outdoor settings were a respite from enclosures and social distancing. As these forces combined, the effects of our increased reliance on the internet led eteam to wonder whether our digital devices needed nurturing too. Their videos feature outings across Taiwan, New York City, and Greene County, which chronicle a diaristic observation of small creatures making contact with technology—among grasses, flowers, fungi, trees, and water—where they engage these strange settings on their own terms.
Detailed views of this interplay give us access to their distinctive features: ornate patterns on wings that zigzag and swirl, segmented legs and hairy bodies, gel-like slime emitting from a body in motion, and other surfaces and textures of various critters fill each screen. Scenes in nature include smartphones and silicon wafers as staging grounds, screens of grids showing restlessly wiggling apps, phone cradles working to increase step counts, and clicking devices furiously boosting likes on social media, with eteam’s camera acting as a witness.
The work conceptually calls to mind Nam June Paik’s TV Garden (1974) but for the 21st century. Caterpillars, snails, moths, and frogs unwittingly pass through, producing a stark visual contrast between their bodies and LCD screens, plastic, and metal materials and between the thickness of insect time and the fast pace and immediacy of a highly technological world. This idea is complemented by an intricate sound design and the occasional image of a skyscraper, whose immutable architecture and lack of visible activity contrast the accelerated lifestyle of our techno present.
These combinations suggest that the thin surface separating one intricate system of interconnection and complexity from another shifts the impression that these staged encounters are interactions between opposites. As we’re dwarfed by the large scale of small creatures on large screens, we’re reminded of our own small stature in a massive, incomprehensibly vast universe, and even in our own towns and cities. We can recognize the ways we’re like an insect that crawls across the reflective surface of a silicon wafer, or a gecko that taps nonsensically on the keyboard of a smartphone, or a deer with a gaze of curiosity and attention when facing a camera. We’re both bigger and smaller than many things. We’re among countless creatures living in a massive grid that entangles and connects us all. In this way, the work reflects a cognitive assemblage of knowledge building and meaning making while also, delightfully, acknowledges our non-understanding of everything.
