Since the launch of ANAT’s second website in 2019, we have showcased a moving image work on the landing page that embodies our core principles of connecting art, science and technology. Particularly pointing to our network’s concern with the natural world.

Most recently, ANAT alumni legend Erica Seccombe’s single channel anaglyph 3D movie, Big Pink which explores the saturated colour, extravagant geometric structure and perfection of a common Dahlia. Another of Erica’s works starred when we introduced our redeveloped website. The stereoscopic projection installation Out of Season, which captured a unique view of mung beans and alfalfa seeds sprouting. Using frontier scientific technologies, Erica probed the impact of plant extinction and global food security.

Yandell Walton, process in development with MoCap data and photogrammetry, Agave Carlton Gardens, 2020. Image courtesy the artist.

The progression continues with fellow ANAT alumni Yandell Walton’s Move Me, a site-specific installation presenting a figure and plant moving in synergy. Yandell is an Australian artist working with moving images, computer-generated imagery and installation. Her practice is driven by instinctual responses to human environmental impacts that lead to scientific and technological research. Yandell has become recognised for immersive works that merge the actual and virtual, to investigate notions of impermanence, interrogating shifting environments caused by climate change.

Move Me’s creation and evolution beautifully exemplify ANAT’s mission, offering foundational support for experimental research within the trajectory of an artist’s practice. Yandell was selected for ANAT Ideate in 2020, the home / studio based residency model that was a direct response to COVID19. She proposed research in emergent technologies to enable the animation of volumetric scans. The artist’s objective was to merge natural environments with human motion, to create a cross-species. During the program the she developed workflows merging human movement with 3D-modeled plants captured from the environment. ANAT Ideate was the initial project that sparked Yandell’s interest in multi-species theory.

Building on processes learnt during the creation of Move Me, Yandell was one of thirteen participating artists in LABVERDE in 2022, an art immersion program based in the Amazon rainforest. The program, conducted with Brazil’s National Institute of Amazonian Research and the Chico Mendes Institute for Biodiversity Conservation, seeks to foster environment-related artistic languages by bringing together artists, Indigenous people, ecologists, and scientists in the Speculative Ecologies program.

Labverde interview Yandell Walton, by Rodrigo Valle.

Dissonant Terrain is an outcome of the Labverde residency program. A range of digital mediums, including computer-generated images, video, sound, lighting, and sculpture, critiquing the complex relationship between technology, nature, and the posthuman. Dissonant Terrain was commissioned by Wagga Wagga Art Gallery with the support of Create NSW.

Yandell’s recent work is inspired by multispecies ethnography–bridging the surreal, mechanical, and terrestrial in pursuit of plant and human symbiosis. Through working with technology, including photogrammetry and Real-Time Motion Capture, this new work aims to create hybrid species, where the living and the non-living, the human and the non-human intermingle.

MultiSpecies Convergence, 2023 Wagga Wagga Art Gallery.

A new iteration of this work is MultiSpecies Convergence, which featured in the group exhibition Renditions Reconsidering tensions between artificiality and authenticity at Project8 Gallery, curated by Cūrā8 in late 2023. Renditions delved into the interaction between creation, emulation, artifice, and deception by examining various methods through which artists negotiate the contrasts between truth and fiction, authenticity and replication. For the performance Installation Yandell’s collaborative team included choreographer and digital artist Harrison Hall, realtime artist Liam Wolfe, performer Sarah Aiken and composers Jana Irmert and Philipp Rumsch.

MultiSpecies Convergence Performance Installation, 2023 Project8 Gallery.

Learn more about Yandell’s work on her website.

The ANAT Alumni is a network of hundreds of artists, scientists and technologists. A lifelong community of remarkable, diverse and engaged professionals.

Read more about the ANAT Alumni here.