ECOLOGIX
// Artist in Residence Research-Creation Project, 2016 //
ECOLOGIX is a research-creation platform developed during an Artist-in-Residence position, funded by the Edmonton Arts Council as part of the City of Edmonton’s Art of Living cultural plan. This project emerged through collaborations with staff, clients, and English language learning students at ASSIST Community Services Centre, a community organization supporting Canadian immigrants and their families.
Beier’s engagements with the active and diverse programs at ASSIST led to the development of a new branch of research-creation focused on exploring how connections are made (or not made) between individuals and groups, concepts and material ‘reality’, and systems of knowledge. The ECOLOGIX platform documents, experiments with, and builds on this research trajectory, offering both a site for refleXion and creation.
Exhibitions
Trailing the World Behind (2016) – A text and light installation that explored language, translation, and the instability of meaning-making through a collaborative writing experiment using (mis)translation, (mis)interpretation, and technological intervention, exhibited at ASSIST Community Services Centre (Edmonton, Alberta).
The Beginning of the Middle of the End (2016) – An immersive two-channel video installation that deconstructed cinematic clichés and narrative tropes by layering cuts, repetitions, glitches, and superimpositions, creating a perpetual state of unresolved tension and disquieting middle-ness, exhibited at Sled Island (Calgary, Alberta).
Diagrams + Animations (Excerpts)
Taking cues from Guattari’s ecosophic thought and his call for the creation of new ethico-aesthetic paradigms, ECOLOGIX unfolded through a range of diagrammatic and artistic “probe-heads”—those “nonsignifying, nonsubjective, essentially collective, polyvocal and corporeal” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987) modes of inquiry that rupture dominant images of thought. Rather than relying on critique or negation, these speculative probes worked to generate new ways of becoming and relating, engaging in experimental writing, drawing, and digital animation to explore how connections are made (or not made) between individuals, concepts, and systems of knowledge.
INSUFFICIENT/INSUFFLATION, 2016
NOT HOLEY ACCURATE, 2016
NOT AVAILABLE, 2016
CO-CREATED WORK w/ STUDENTS + COLLEAGUES
“We Contain Multitudes” - Animation Experiments w/ Students