On July 31, 2024, NOW Art Founder Carmen Zella sat down with artist Alice Bucknell for a live conversation about public art and LUMINEX 3.0 on Instagram (@nowart_la). RSVP here for future LUMINEX Artist Talks.
Below is a transcript of the video:
Carmen Zella (CZ): Hi, everyone. Carmen Zella, Alice Bucknell. Thank you so much for joining, for those that are starting to join this live IG chat. It’s funny. I totally lost track of the time because I was actually engaged, and I was like, oh my gosh, we’re not recording this conversation. We should be recording this conversation.
Yeah, Alice and I just totally did a deep dive, which I’m going to rehash for everybody now that this is being recorded. So thank you everybody for joining. We’re going to jump right in with Alice because these IG chats are meant to be pseudo-informal, but really give us an understanding of the artist who is being presented.
So Alice is going to be at Luminex this year, which we’re very very excited about her project that Alice is going to be presenting there. And it’s based on a work that was created initially in – started in 2022 – and then it actually was finished in November of 2023.
Alice Bucknell (AB): The film came out, and yeah – the game I wrapped up a couple months ago. It’s like pretty fresh.
CZ: So this is what you’re going to see at Luminex this year. And I’m going to talk with Alice about her, Alice’s career and you’re going to be in a residency over in Europe during Luminex. So this is a great opportunity for us to be able to do a deeper dive and have Alice talk about the piece and talk about public art.
So I’m going to jump in if that’s cool. I wanted to start off with just giving the audience and myself a little bit of an inquiry into, like, why public art? What is your interest in creating public art?
AB: Yeah, totally. This is definitely – in terms of scale, right – the biggest presentation of the work that I’ve done. The idea of taking over, in my case, the façade of a parking lot, is just scale-wise gigantic. But I also think in terms of public art at large the accessibility of it is something that I’m really interested in.
[When it comes to digital work] it’s the idea of this layering, like putting this work temporarily on a site in LA, – like of course the project I’m presenting, it’s all about Los Angeles. So it feels like especially meaningful in that regard to really have the work existing inside of this like urban context that it’s part of. But yeah, my work in general, like it’s using, like video games and like film, like genres that historically have bled out of the art world and are super accessible.
Like gaming has this massive pop cultural appeal. I think I’m really interested in that kind of element or accessibility, and just a wide variety of audiences. I think in LA specific context it’s really nice to get people on the street. Because it’s like a city that so often is just like car centric, and I don’t know, I like people to be like walking around, and like experiencing this work super close up.
CZ: Have you ever shown any work that is to scale so that people can actually have a physical experience with it and like walk in or?
AB: No honestly this is my first one really. It’s ironic, it’s funny because yeah like right after LUMINEX opens I’ll be doing something similar in Madrid at Matadero which is this beautiful space inside of an old slaughterhouse so you can imagine like gigantic brick walls like so I’m going to be doing something similar where it’s like multi channel projection inside of a triple height room basically, so yeah, that’s going to be like another, kind of experience where you’re like walking inside of it and it’s hyper immersive.
But yeah, up until now it’s been pretty, like it’s ironic considering the scale of the work that I’m making. It’s been pretty like, small scale in terms of like presentation.
CZ: So talk to us a little bit about the work that you’re presenting at LUMINEX. Everything from the title to the adaptation of both the film and like the insertion of the characters in the gaming world. I’d love to get that.
AB: Totally, yeah. The project’s called The Alluvials. And it’s, the name comes from like this type of, I mean it’s very nerdy. But it’s basically like in ecology or like river studies. It’s like looking at the alluvial plain. Which is this wash of sediment that a river leaves behind.
So it’s almost like a fossilized index of the river changing paths or drying up. And yeah, I mean the project deals a lot with LA’s relationship to water, historically and into the future. It deals a lot with water scarcity, like this fear of drought that’s always been part and parcel of how the city defines itself and exists kind of incredibly despite. And it’s looking at all the sort of economic, legal, political forces that went into basically LA masterminding this plan for itself to become a city in the desert, right? And it’s really critical of – while acknowledging all of that – it’s very critical of this sort of colonial interstate and international politics that went into the development of what it is today.
CZ: So some of the sites that you identify in the work are obviously the 6th Street Bridge, the LA River. Can you talk a little bit about some of the desert-scapes and some of those landscapes that you’ve included.
AB: Yeah, totally. All my work is super research heavy, right? The Alluvials came out of this – both the game and film came out of this like four month long research period where I was just like really heavily mainlining all of the L. A. public libraries’ research archives. So I was looking a lot at the, what’s called the water wars in California.
And that kind of extends to like Nevada, like to Mexico – looking at how L.A. engineered, through water infrastructure and like political bargaining, an entire kind of terraforming, I guess you could call it, off California. So yeah, LA still gets a ton of its water from the Hoover Dam just over the border into Nevada like around 30 to 35 percent annually of its water consumption comes from there.
So one of the, one of the levels in the video game, and one of the chapters in the video piece is set in the Hoover Dam. But one thing that’s quite typical of my work is this layering of different worlds. So it’s simultaneously looking at the Joshua Tree, which is an endangered species of yucca that exists out in the desert. It has one surviving pollinator, the yucca moth. And it’s this case of extreme symbiosis. If one of them dies, the other one dies. It’s like this ripple effect of mass extinction.
So simultaneously in this level, it imagines the Hoover Dam dried up. And it imagines the Joshua Tree, which according to the scientific studies, it’s trying its best to move northward. Like as far as a tree could possibly move. Like it’s slowly tracking – if you look at the pollination cycles and like where new Joshua’s are sprouting.
CZ: So where’s the furthest that the Joshua Tree is tracked in your research?
AB: I was out in California City last week for new research for new projects. So that’s that’s much further north. I think it’s closer to Fort Irwin, so yeah, it’s there. There are some Joshua’s across the border already in Nevada, so the kind of thing that I’m proposing isn’t actually that far off. And, yeah, I don’t know – Lake Mead itself, which is the artificial lake that the Hoover Dam is bult on top of, is also at risk of drying up. So a lot of my work just takes like conditions or like scenarios that feel future adjacent, like they’re already happening, and then it just like twists those or extends those speculations into the future.
CZ: So like with the moth in the Joshua landscape. Can you talk about like your character association?
AB: Yeah. So for the game like each of the game levels, there’s four levels, each of the game levels is reflecting on a different type of video game. So for that level, I’m looking at the first person shooter, which is like the most popular and also the most flatline kind of video game out there.
And I’m recasting it as like first person pollinator. It’s a level where you play either as the tree or the moth. And it’s this case of extreme symbiosis of the end of the world – the Hoover Dam is totally dried up, it feels very apocalyptic. And yet this tree and it’s single pollinator has made it somehow into this dust bowl, into this ruinscape.
I mean it’s sort of silly. It’s this really multi-species orgy, sort of. If you play as the moth, like you’re basically flying through the air and you just have to like leap from tree to tree.
Like you have to aim and it’s like a shooter. But it’s about sex, and it’s about reproduction and it’s about pollination. So for me it was like a nice way to reverse or challenge some of the obvious and inherent violence to gaming.
And then if you play his tree, bbviously you can’t move because you’re a tree, but you are using the microphone and you have to talk to the moth to get it to come over to you.
CZ: You have to entice the moth.
AB: Exactly. Yeah, so it’s really silly. Humor is actually a really big part of my work.
In a way, it is very serious and it’s looking at ecological crisis and all these compounded poly-crises that frame the present. But then I also am asking the player or viewer to step into this slightly psychedelic space, where they’re like becoming a moth or becoming a tree and that’s such a strange.
CZ: Or becoming a coyote.
AB: Coyote, yeah. Or I don’t know, in two of the levels you play as elements. So like you play as water or you play as fire, so there’s just this really strung out embodiment to it, like what’s the collective intelligence of fire? Like, how does it move? I don’t know, like these are very interesting mechanical questions in terms of building a game. But then they also have like deep philosophical and existential questions too.
CZ: When we were having our conversation beforehand, there was something that I think was a really important distinguising description that you had about world building versus worlding.
AB: Yeah.
CZ: Which is so interesting to me because when I look at artwork that’s created and constructed in the VR space, there’s this level of interactivity, and for the audience I was framing, okay, so what’s the distinction? So can you share what your description was?
AB: Yeah, I mean language really matters. Like semantics matter, and like Donna Haraway says, it matters what words world worlds.
So it matters what the language is that you’re using to create the world it is that you’re imagining, because language implicitly implies a voice, it implies a speaker, like someone saying those words. So yeah, I think of world building, it’s like a phrase that’s been around for a really long time.
Like historically, it’s been tied to a lot of old school science fiction. So like William Gibson, Neuromancer, or I don’t know, like Star Wars, like Lord of the Rings. It’s this creation of a cinematic universe inside of which you tell a story. And it has this very sealed outer edge.
It’s usually a guy. Historically, it’s always been, like, a white guy. Or it’s a studio, but the studio is following the direction of this one person. And it’s a static environment, in a sense. It’s a world that’s self contained.
Whereas if you look at the origins of the term worlding, it’s coming out of Gayatri Spivak’s essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?”, which is this essay on postcolonial theory and the origins of making worlds through language and cartography, and it’s looking at how whoever has the words has the power has the world.
But then it’s also looking at Donna Haraway and a lot of eco-feminists and new materialist thinkers, people who are basically the thing about a world is it’s never over. Like it’s always evolving and changing. And it’s fundamentally this like super open-ended system that’s really organic.
Super organic. You don’t really know where it begins or ends, as a player in the world you don’t even really know where you end and where the world begins. So it’s this kind of like radical reimagining of the world as something that’s nonhierarchical and collaboratively created. And that it’s always evolving. It’s this messy kind of project that we, like, all kind of hold together.
CZ: Can multiple players play your game at the same time?
AB: Right now, The AIlluvials is the first video game I’ve made. And, yeah I made it as a single player game. In the pandemic, I got really into more like indie games. And when I say indie games, I mean just non-normative gaming, a lot of games that deal with like grief, or like ecological disruption, or like queerness, just like a lot of heavy kind of topics. And these are games often that create this very meditative space that’s supposed to be experienced individually.
Like it becomes this very kind of introspective way of understanding or processing trauma, or like just your way of moving through the world. So that’s the kind of gaming that I was responding to when I was making this project.
But, I’m not opposed to massively multiplayer online games. I really like, actually, the social dynamics. I still play Second Life, I like that kind of chaos mode of a game, like a world that’s co-created by other people. But I haven’t actually made it myself because it would be complicated in terms of making a thing and like making it run online. Like that’s like a multi million dollar operation, to that scale.
But yeah, one, one idea I am thinking about for a next project is like a game that requires like multiple people to play it in order to beat it. So it like destroys this notion of the individual, right? Which has a very clear ecological implication.
CZ: That’s cool. It’s interesting because you’re creating like a way in which the audience is interacting with your artwork, so what would be your hope for the piece that you’re going to be positioning for LUMINEX? What is the takeaway that you’d love the audience to have?
AB: Yeah, I mean it’s an interesting question. Like I’m really excited about what I’m showing at LUMINEX because it’s like a combination of the video game and the video piece. So the video work is like more of a systems thing. Like it’s looking at this whole kind of world, right? And then the game is very personal.
Like you’re playing as like a wolf or you’re playing as like wildfire, but it’s always like the individual. So in a way this hybrid like four channel piece is a combination of both of those perspectives. So it’s simultaneously seeing like the whole world, but it’s also experiencing it in a really intimate way.
And I feel like because the origin story of the work and the inspiration behind it was the city of L.A. and the approach I’m taking is this sort of non-human POV, right? Playing with all these different characters. I basically just really want people to like, walk away from it, having a very different understanding of like how L.A. came to be.
CZ: So do you feel like the work that you are going to be doing at LUMINEX is in some way gonna help to evolve new works that we’re gonna see in this direction?
AB: I feel like this idea of worlding is just like another iteration or like another moment for the work to evolve into something else.
All my projects take a year or so to become a thing. So I like the idea that it can branch off like a little, I don’t know, mycorrhizal network, right? A sort of like underground root system where it can just become all these many different things and it’s never really over or done, it’s just like always is changing and evolving. So yeah, I’m really excited to see like what people think. Like I mean it’s gonna be like such an interesting experience. I’m so bummed that I can’t be here in person.
CZ: You’re going to be here virtually.
AB: Yeah – existentially, spiritually, I’m here.
CZ: Thank you so much for doing this IG chat. Sorry for the human disruptions.
AB: It’s a multi-species ensemble! It’s great.
CZ: That’s very generous.
I wanted to move it over to the chat if anyone has any questions for Alice that they want to approach about Alice’s work, about the work that Alice is doing at LUMINEX or anything that we’ve talked about. I’m gonna just bring this a tiny bit closer so that I can do a chat. There’s no questions.
Are there any final comments or like anything that you wanna share about upcoming projects – which sounds extremely interesting as well?
AB: Yeah the reason I’m not gonna be here is because I basically having like a long European moment doing a couple residencies, like the one I’m the most excited about is at CERN, which is the Center for Nuclear Physics Research.
It’s based in Geneva and I’ll be looking into black holes and making a video game where you play as a black hole. So it’s gonna really wild.
CZ: Where you play as a black hole? You are the black hole?
AB: Yeah – Well tou’re simultaneously a black hole and a lichen. So I was looking specifically at micro black holes, which are so small, it’s impossible to prove they exist.
So that’s what CERN is looking into right now. It’s one of its main research streams. But I’m really interested – it’s a very new direction for me, because I feel like all my work is large scale, and about building these whole worlds. And with this project, I’m looking at the way in which minimal forms of intelligence come to be, or minimal forms of life exist.
Like something so tiny that you can’t even know if it’s there for sure. And then the ways that lichens are like small planets. Like they have multiple species existing in the same body or the same organism. Which also is true of us, by the way, like we’re mostly bacteria. Like we’re mostly not human.
I think it’s all about disrupting this this idea of the human being apart from the world that we inhabit. But this is going to be a new direction because it’s very focused on like the micro and like the tiny and it’s about paying attention to life or intelligence that’s so small that you don’t even know if it’s really there.
CZ: But also extremely powerful.
AB: Yeah, it can wipe us out, but you can’t even see it. It’s crazy.
CZ: Wow. So there’s going to be a lot more incredible art projects that this artist is going to be bringing to the table. So thank you so much. We’re in South Park right now. So we thought it was appropriate to bring Alice into the hood.
Thank you everyone. We’re going to post the recording of this video on our Instagram. And if you have any comments, please send them over to info@nowartla.org and we will be sure to direct them to the artist and make sure that your questions are answered. But we’ll see all of you at LUMINEX.
Alright. Take care!