Shona Neary / Sketchy Shona
Human Cocoon is the first physical structure in a longer inquiry into bodies, global networks, living matter and entropy.
The first structure
Human Cocoon began as a drawing of a body folded inside a porous silver form. It became an installation at DA SWAMP, where a person could sit inside the structure and meet the room through its openings. I was working with a difficult relation: what can the body see, and what can see it?
I now see Human Cocoon as the first structural beginning of a longer inquiry. Its bodily scale and porous form give me a place to start from. I do not want to claim that the installation already contained antennas, sensors or biological experiments. It did not. The next project can build from its structure while asking what happens when invisible signals, living matter and a changing body occupy the same space.
Listening to what is usually called weightless
The title of my current proposal is Entropic Antennas. I want to make an installation that treats energy and data networks as physical conditions, not as a cloud floating above daily life. Wireless communication depends on equipment, electricity, minerals, buildings and labour. Those systems pass through places and bodies even when we cannot see them.
The project proposes sculptural forms made from reclaimed cellulose pulp, gypsum, living biomaterials such as mycelium or SCOBY, copper antennas, receivers, microphones and open-source sensors. As moisture and biological activity change the materials, I want to test whether their electrical and acoustic properties change in ways the work can register. The sound installation would make those changes available to people in the room.
These are proposed methods, not results I have already achieved. The materials, measurement approach and ninety-day decay process all need testing. I need to be precise about what is being measured, how reliable the result is, and how much of the final sound comes from a sensor, a material change or a choice I make as an artist.
What does it mean to listen?
My proposal asks how a sculpture might meet the wireless activity around it. That raises a question I need to resolve before building: how can a work listen to a network without collecting private communication? I need to distinguish sensing the presence or change of a signal from capturing anyone's personal data, and decide what permissions, controlled sources or non-content measurements the work requires.
That boundary belongs to the concept, not only to the equipment. A system can make information legible while also turning people into material without their knowledge. I want the work to examine that tension without reproducing it carelessly.
Entropy is a condition, not an effect
Entropy is a major part of what inspires me. In this project, biological change would not be a visual metaphor added to an already finished sculpture. It would be part of the material research. Cellulose, plaster, moisture, living cultures and electrical components do not all change at the same rate or in the same way. Their relations will need to be observed and tested.
I am not looking to make decay look dramatic for its own sake. I want to see what remains, what changes and what becomes audible as a structure moves toward another state. The installation would hold material change next to the systems that describe energy as clean, stable and immaterial.
Building from Human Cocoon
Human Cocoon is not a finished version of this new work. It is the first physical form that gives me a structure to think from: a body held inside a porous boundary, with the world still present on the other side. Entropic Antennas carries that relation into a longer inquiry about entropy, global signals and the infrastructures that connect technology to living matter.
I do not yet know what the final form or sound will be. I want the research to change the work as it develops, rather than use a finished theory to make the materials illustrate a conclusion.
Images from this journal record
Human Cocoon and the signals inside the body / human cocoon installation Artwork: Sketchy Shona (Shona Neary).
Human Cocoon and the signals inside the body / human cocoon concept
Human Cocoon and the signals inside the body / human cocoon detail
Credits
- Artist and concept: Sketchy Shona
- Human Cocoon photography: Soyboy Photography