Robustness to Uncertainty A handwoven score

When threatened, groups of starlings display robustness to uncertainty by systematically filtering information to form murmurations or swarms. Each starling filters out the noise of the others and listens only to the information from their seven nearest neighbours.

Swarms and murmurations are physical gestures that allow animals to complete tasks they could not do alone. They are scalable, self- organizing, and responsive, like a multi-core processor or a music score.

With time, light, thread and gravity as her materials, Vancouver artist Amanda Wood, carefully considers physical gesture, digital space and self-organizing systems.

Can we freeze time to discover ourselves in relation to physical and digital experiences? How can a physical gesture represent the remnants of an action: a murmuration, the swell of a piece of music, the forces of gravity, the gradations of a shadow, a conversation, movement through digital space?

In this work, artists Aleksandra Dulic and Miles Thorogood explore light and physical material in a topological composition of the Okanagan Valley. The interplay of the tangible and intangible materials highlight the duality of the earth and our place of being human within it – the external pastiche of object juxtaposing inner meaning and shared experience. Installed in the Alternator’s Window Gallery, Fields of Light brings together with fabric, woven aluminum, copper, optic fiber, electronics, and a Creative AI to generate a living, dynamic system.