Rewa Wright: Towards the Eco-Digital: Real-Time Animation with Plants, Data and Sound

The ’eco-digital’ is an area of artistic research that explores the intersection of digital technology and ecological themes. Often artists are looking at how art can help highlight the climate crisis, motivating the public to act. Combining digital art practices, such as computer animation, virtual reality, and generative art, with a focus on ecological issues, eco-digital art invites and encourages discourse on a wide range of environmental sustainability, biodiversity, and the relationship between technology and nature. In this intersectional domain, animation can play a valuable role, creating new approaches that reflect, critique, and even propose solutions to contemporary environmental challenges. The eco-digital approach emphasizes the integration of natural processes and digital aesthetics to foster a deeper understanding of and engagement with the natural world. Working at the intersection of animation, sound, installation and data visualisation, we explore ways that digital systems and ecological systems can interact, drawing attention to the common threads that link both humans and plants. This is possible through a variety of methods and techniques: this research examines one such approach, combining plant bio-electrical signals, Indigenous thinking, human music and real time animation. Our goal is to develop approaches that might benefit future hybrid ecosystems, incorporating Indigenous practices of environmental care that mobilise animation and operate to bring the public closer to nature.