Artist Statment
Polycosmos reconciles the culture-nature divide through a composition process that merges the
beauty of natural environments with human figures. As a work of generative art, the images
are produced with a computer program that transforms images of the human body to embed and
extend them with natural environments. A generative collage program builds artwork from an
extensive database of photographs of people, human actions, plants, animals, landscapes, and
google satellite images. Meaning, both broad and focused, is drawn out of the work by
including, in the compositing process, layers of human portraiture drawn from the beautifully
diverse community characteristic of Okanagan. The natural images function to reorganize and
enhance the body — becoming skins and spaces — making each a merging of the human and the
world we inhabit. As an experience, the work situates itself around the boundary between
knowledge, loss, hope and memory. People, their faces and bodies emerge and are torn apart
by images of sustainable and unsustainable human action. Characterization of multiple states
of being is expressed as a state in which we at once carry an embodiment of the world within
us while being subject to the changes wrought on ourselves by the external forces of an
enveloping world. In this way, the work attempts to show an interpenetration of the human with
the world — an interpenetration that might hopefully enter into a discourse on a transpersonal
state of being conducive to a rethinking of our place in the world as continuous, cohabitant,
participatory and fundamentally resonant with the world.
About the artists:
Polycosmos is a collaboration between Canadian artists Aleksandra Dulic and Miles Thorogood.
They have 30 yrs of combined experience as media artists, working at the intersection of
visual art, sound art, performance, and computer science. Their work has been displayed
internationally at festivals and galleries, including in Canada, South Korea, Serbia,
France, and Australia.
generative machine learning visual compositing.
