Keemon Williams
Ultra-Native Beast Sentinel
2023 ----- Augmented reality sculpture ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------0---------------0------------0------------0
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Ultra-Native Beast Sentinel was part of Museum of Brisbane's Botanica: Contemporary Art Outside, an annual showcase of ambitious temporary public artworks occupying various corners of the city's Botanic Gardens. Botanica 2023 was a part of Brisbane Art Design (BAD) Festival, and was curated by Lucy Quinn and Produced by Tamara Hembury.
The artists responded to the theme ‘Tread Softly’ which considered a millennium of human influence by reflecting on our natural environments.
RATIONALE:
Emerging from a realm unseen, a cybernetic megafauna stands tall. Scanning for signs of life, this fierce creature seems to be a dingo evolved to survive a distant and dangerous future…
Ultra-Native Beast Sentinel is a virtual deity inhabiting public space through Augmented Reality (AR). The use of AR technology offers an immersive sculptural experience, devoid of physical structure, paying respects to the balance of the natural landscape. Rejecting notions of land ownership and "structure", it analyses spectators from within a virtual spirit world, untethered from material colonial boundaries.
This project explores the potential for the metaphysical realm to serve as a decolonial space, inciting storytelling and reclamation of land through digital intervention. A looming metal beast embodies an omnipresent indigeneity inherent to this country, throughout human history, and far into upcoming millennia.
Our Dreaming is not an antiquated concept, it is starkly contemporary and exists simultaneously in both our collective past, present and futures.
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Documentation directly from mobile device
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PROJECT DEVELOPMENT:
This commission was the first time my practice delved into Augment Reality technology, and my largest public artwork to date. More familiar with traditional sculpting techniques, I subcontracted Luke Harris, a freelance Creative Designer and former Cross Reality Designer for UAP, to teach me how to translate my processes into the 3D modelling/rigging pipeline. We were able to take my analogue sculpts, scan them with photogrammetry, and reform them in digital sculpting software, including VR sculpting tool Gravity Sketch, teaching me new skills to expand my practice.
Botanica 2023 was an invaluable opportunity that saw my practice achieve colossal scale in an unfamiliar medium, which I thought saw a gap in terms of First Nations representation. Ultra-Native Beast Sentinel challenged audiences expectations of contemporary Indigenous practice and the public as site for arts engagement. My year was made seeing families and children gleefully interact so candidly with a work I'd spent months on developing, not sure how it would even be received in situ. Having the privilege to show my work at this scale has further cemented my future interest in public-facing arts projects and large scale installations/activations. I hope to study the public/institutional art commissioning scene, including biennales and festivals, to see where this technology and other modes of my practice may find its place, disrupting histories and celebrating site.
