At both museums, visitors are invited to co-create a digital ecosystem of fantastical plants. Using a new drawing app on iPad Pro with Apple Pencil, participants can sketch and create imaginative plants and flowers and upload them to a global database. Almost instantly, their drawings, joined in real-time by other users’ art across both museums, bloom into 3D plant structures, trailing across the floor, walls, and ceiling.
More than an immersive simulation, Deep Field also asks its audience to consider a new perspective on the interconnectedness of living organisms. Using the app’s UV mode, participants can walk around and observe the vivid UV patches on real flowers and plants that cannot be seen by humans, allowing them to perceive the world as butterflies, bees, and bioluminescent fireflies. Thanks to a layered multichannel soundscape by audio naturalist Martyn Stewart, founder of The Listening Planet, participants can listen to endangered and extinct species while viewing their artwork in the app.
“At a time when the threat of widespread biodiversity loss looms larger than ever, Deep Field invites visitors and school children at both museums to engage with forgotten worlds anew: to shift perspectives, to listen and learn, to call a wondrous future into being,” says artists Tin Nguyen & Edward Cutting.
“We are delighted to have collaborated with Tin&Ed on Deep Field, as an opportunity for our audiences to explore the rich relationships that exist between nature and art enhanced by new technologies that help us see and experience the world differently,” says Keishia Gu, the J. Paul Getty Museum’s head of education. “Climate sustainability and environmental justice are urgent issues at the forefront of the minds of many of the young people we work with in Museum education. For this reason, Deep Field is a perfect opportunity for us to enlist the talents within our Teen Gallery Guide internship program, allowing our summer interns the opportunity to facilitate learning experiences in the galleries together with the app. There are no better stewards for this project than the young people who will inherit the Earth and feel the greatest sense of responsibility to discuss the future health of our planet and ways to protect it.”
At the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Deep Field workshop participants will visit the Yiribana Gallery to look closely at works depicting plants from the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art collection. Reflecting on what they saw, each participant will draw inspiration from the world’s oldest continuous cultures to create their unique virtual flora using iPad Pro and Apple Pencil. Deep Field workshops are now on at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, daily at 11am and 1:30pm until 16 July. Admission is free, no reservations are required.
Art Gallery of New South Wales Programs Manager, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art, Wesley Shaw says: “It has been a pleasure collaborating with Tin&Ed to inspire a different way of viewing the world from the lens of biodiversity. Young participants get to observe the way artists represent nature in our Yiribana Gallery collection, as well as help create an imagined ecology through an augmented reality experience.”
The interactive project at the Getty Center in Los Angeles will take place July 8, 11–16, 2023, from 10:30am to 3pm, for free with no reservations required. Visitors can choose to sign-up for a tour through the Museum of plant-related objects in the collection to inspire their experience or dive right into the app.
After Getty and the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Deep Field will continue to other cultural institutions around the world.
About Tin&Ed
Tin Nguyen and Edward Cutting are Australian artists and creative technologists based in New York. They create playful installations and experiences that illuminate the borderless dimension between art and science, the physical and the digital, the human and the more than human. Their work is driven by a deep curiosity for the natural world and the intricate ways we are connected to it. They use art to envision the world through this lens of interconnectedness.
Tin&Ed are alumni of NEW INC, the art and technology incubator run by the New Museum. They were part of the interactive experiences cohort in year six and creative science cohort in year seven. Their work has been shown at The Rockefeller Center and Pioneer Works in New York, The Getty Museum in L.A., The Smithsonian in Washington DC, The Barbican Centre in London and Space10 Gallery in Copenhagen.