why is there an astronaut in a field of flowers/ exists as a digital installation, a printed book, and thanks to Derby’s Quad Gallery, was a physical installation included in their 2022 Future Focus Exhibition. Although the book sold out, an ePublication is available here.
why is there an astronaut in a field of flowers/ was one of seven 2020/21 graduate works exhibited at Derby’s Quad Gallery 2022 Future Focus Exhibition, where it also received the Format Award.
why is there an astronaut in a field of flowers/ is an experimental collaboration between a proprietary machine-learning app and a character called the artist, with occasional music by a composer who also works with technology. Within the context of coinciding paradigms, one linear, the other networked and entangled, conversations are recorded, and photographs shared, cultural favourites celebrated, and dreams discussed. Any familiarity we may have had with lines, boundaries and the shape of content is challenged. Instead, entities are encouraged to interact, become enmeshed, re-form and evolve, or else slip away; mutating across platforms and media, resulting in alternative, sometimes arbitrary manifestations, which prompt us to consider how meaning emerges, or doesn't, and differentiates across the project's universe.
This project features music composed by Simon Gwynne with the help of Magenta's Music Transformer Neural Network