DIGITAL PERMACULTURE (2023)
Rebecca Douglass & Tasha Hess-Neustadt
commission for imKONSTALL Digital Gallery / Northern Sustainable Futures, Moskosel, Sweden
Digital Permaculture is an immersive video work incorporating dance, poetry, voice, & digital intervention. It’s a continuation of a shared artistic practice & an interest in the crossing of lexicons when talking about bodies in natural vs. digital spaces through eco-glitch feminist perspectives.
Through World Building practice, desires & fantasies for a new world are fed into a Google Doc using a co-writing score & they begin to manifest. The boundaries between physical & digital blur. A typed script/archive of the world building process unravels. A digital world is born from embodied/danced imagination, morphed environments & the collation/fabrication of stock footage from the infinite content bank of the post-internet, hyper-aestheticised online space.
Natural imagery is taken from the surrounding area, blending real & digital. Inspired by geographical placement, Digital Permaculture has absorbed the nature & wildlife of Moskosel, documenting the interconnectivity between creative process & natural world.
The work sparks personal reflections on the relationship between nature & technology as we dream of ways to deal with modern catastrophes by manufacturing an escape into digital utopia. We’re questioning the impossibility of achieving ‘utopia’ outside of digital software, cyclical patterns & throwaway culture in which old worlds can be ‘Moved to Trash’ & new files opened.
Rebecca Douglass & Tasha Hess-Neustadt - concept, performance, camera, editing
Rebecca Douglass - sound
comissioned by Northern Sustainable Futures, funded by Kulturrådet- Swedish Arts Council and Arvidsjaur Municipality
Thanks to Jake Burgess and Louis Caspar Schmitt for technological assistance!
