Laura Dekker

Laura Dekker's research-based practice explores relationships between humans, technology and nature, questioning whether these are even useful categorisations. These ideas are investigated through interactive installations and walks, combining physical organic materials, real-time data computation, robotics, drawing, video, audio and performance, often working collaboratively. Laura aims to engage with a sensorially rich and provocative experience, transporting the viewer-participant into the artwork.    

Recent projects include Expressive Machine, a disparate ecosystem of almost-sentient electronic devices that chat away in the dimness, sensing by whatever means they have at their disposal. They synaesthetically hear and taste what they see - each other, visitors - responding with commentary, in turn sending messages out into the ether, to be intercepted, or not. Visitors can involve themselves, providing data 'nutrients' to this system by scanning themselves through an electronic microscope, tending the moss garden, or triggering events by stroking certain soft velvety parts of the machine assemblage.

As A Machine That Would Never Break is a series of interactive video works examining human interventions in the natural world. Technology is investigated as symptomatic of particular human blind-spots or values. In these installations, you encounter a large projection of layers of captured video of constantly changing scale, pace and texture. Layers erode and reveal, dissolved by your presence - your moving form. One moment you are made of racing water, reduced to the size of a damselfly, dragged amongst churning flotsam garbage or submerged deep in unscheduled sewage outflow. Your presence implicates you in these events, and your direct or indirect role.