Digital Matter Projects

Resident Alien is a single-channel video work that conjures the presence of something living, yet unplaceable. Like the paradox held in its title, the work embodies tension between the foreign and the familiar, the synthetic and the organic.

Created through a careful interplay of forward and reverse footage, the viscous substance at the centre of Resident Alien pulses rhythmically, as though drawing breath. This cyclical motion lends the material a lifelike quality, oozing, expanding, and contracting in a way that evokes a creature in slow metamorphosis.

While its surface and behaviour might suggest a digitally animated form, the work is entirely analogue, filmed in real time. The illusion of digital artifice is achieved through physical manipulation and editing, challenging the viewer’s trust in the camera as a truth-telling device. In this way, Resident Alien asks us to look more closely: is it alive, or merely performing aliveness?

Exhibited at:
Windows 98 – Pirsook Art Gallery, Shiraz, Iran, 2019
Windows 98 – Aknoon Art Gallery, Esfahan, Iran, 2019
The Weird & the Eerie – The Pharmacy Contemporary Art Space, Carlisle, UK, 2018
Eden Arts Art School Awards, Auckland, 2017 (Highly Commended)

Upward Fall is a single-channel moving image work that explores the contradictions between gravity and illusion, motion and stasis. The title itself presents an impossibility, an ascent that mimics a descent, echoing the oxymoronic nature of the work.

Drawing on the materiality of paint, Upward Fall captures a thick, viscous substance in real time, manipulated to defy expectations. Its dripping, oozing movement plays with notions of control and chance, where the medium’s unruly behaviour is both directed and allowed to unfold. Though the imagery may suggest computer-generated effects, the work is entirely analogue, crafted through camera-based experimentation and temporal layering.

The result is an uncanny transformation: paint becomes something else entirely, biological, cosmic, or synthetic, hovering between the familiar and the alien. Upward Fall asks viewers to suspend disbelief and sit with the ambiguity of the material, its surface, and its motion.

Part of the Wallace Arts Trust Collection.
Highly Commended, Eden Arts Art School Awards, 2017
Exhibited at:
Windows 98 – Pirsook Art Gallery, Shiraz, Iran, 2019
Windows 98 – Aknoon Art Gallery, Esfahan, Iran, 2019
Lightscape – Comet Project Space, Auckland, 2019

Digital Garden explores the tension between the natural environment and mediated reality through the lens of moving image, continuing an ongoing investigation into perception, context, and constructed experience. Framing and sequencing are used to shape the meaning of each moment, prompting viewers to consider how imagery influences our understanding of the world.

Organic materials gathered from natural surroundings, are repurposed and filmed in real time, using shifts in scale and lighting to construct artificial yet believable environments. These carefully composed scenes hover between reality and illusion, creating a moment of ambiguity that reflects on the replacement of direct experience with image-based culture.

Originally developed as an immersive installation featuring three synchronised projections and a living grass environment, the work has since evolved into a standalone moving image piece. This evolution allows Digital Garden to adapt to new spaces and audiences, while still evoking the dreamlike, contemplative atmosphere of its original form. As elements drift in and out of frame, viewers are invited to mentally reconstruct the whole, projecting their own interpretation beyond the screen.

In contrast to the relentless tempo of digital life, Digital Garden unfolds slowly, inviting stillness, observation, and reflection within a newly imagined botanical universe.

Exhibitions
Landscape as a Monument – Izolyatsia, Kyiv, Ukraine, 2020
Digital Screens – Studio One Toi Tū, Auckland Festival of Photography, 2019
Movement – Coventry Cathedral, Coventry, UK, 2019
SEE Djerba, International Media Art Biennial – Houmt Souk, Tunisia, 2019
ON Public Gallery – Medina of Tunis, 2019
Whitecliffe Graduation – Auckland, 2017