2015 » New Zealand » Student Section

The Seed. Weather.

The Seed installation developed from a multidisciplinary collaboration between seven of New Zealand's top art and design students. The Seed installation explores weather as a temporal condition through the assemblage and dispersal of particles.

Weather is an all-encompassing shared atmospheric condition for humanity – it disrupts both individual and community life. It is deeply personal, and simultaneously widely impersonal. It is what we talk about with strangers, while its extremes can bring communities together in solidarity. At the same time, weathering is intrinsic to the human condition; it happens to all of us in the time-space between life and death. It is a gradual process of increasing and unknown instability that erodes memory, time and your sense of space.

In our installation Seed, we look at the relationship of the individual and the community to the weather, while also exploring how weathering occurs over a period of time. The particle nature of the installation can be seen as a metaphor for individuals in a community, each one playing a personal role, while simultaneously coming together for a unified purpose. Giving viewers an avenue to contribute and interact with the installation invites them to become part of our Seed community, where people may work alone in their contribution and have a strongly personal response, but through their interaction with the installation they will inevitably be united with the work and other contributors. Inviting viewers to contribute to the work also provides a catalyst for conversations to occur between strangers (whether about the weather or otherwise.) Their interactions can be tracked by hashtag via twitter/instagram creating an online community that everybody has access to.

The overall arch of the installation is the creation and destruction that is seen through the seasons of the weather, and the constantly changing forms seen in weather patterns. Entering the space, multiple particles are spread across the floor, which can be seen as the barren landscape of winter. As the particles are connected and forms begin to appear, we see the sprouting of new life. Over the course of the week, there may be many manifestations of new life and deterioration as the installation shifts and changes its form through the interactions of the public. Like our finely balanced weather systems, it will at times reach peaks of instability before collapsing. Some people may relocate the particles outside of the confines of the Basement, embodying the wind as they disperse the seeds out into the wider Prague community. It is through this freedom of action that the installation takes on the notion of unpredictability as we (the designers) do not dictate how the audience will engage with the seeds. In our final performance of ‘watering’ the particles housing color powder, we see the seeds come into bloom and the installation change its form once again.

Weathering is a temporal condition, the effects of which are out of human control. The change that will occur to the space over the course of the week is representative of this, as aside from the change in the configuration of the particles being assembled, disassembled and dispersed, the particles will become used, tired and stepped on. Using a brittle material such as bamboo veneer, we will see particles become fractured, broken and naturally weathered.