Rasa Smite, Raitis Smits. Deep Sensing. National Science and Technology Center in Taipei, Taiwan, 2024. Photo: Pohao Chi

Attend a lecture by Rasa Smite and Raitis Smite taking place at the Art Academy of Latvia, Room 14 on November 27, 2024 at 14:35-16:05 and learn about their latest works - from "Atmospheric Forest" to "Deep Sensing"!

In an art practice that involves the use of immersive technologies to create new experiences, there is a significant gap between the immersive experience and the real environment. Such "immersive" works often focus on visual saturation that distances the viewer from the reality of the environment, including climate change.

However, it is this 'gap' that plays an important role in immersive studies as an unexplored territory, creating and contextualising 'naturally artificial' environments. Two of the most recent artworks by Rasa Smite and Raitis Smits, Atmospheric Forest (2020) and Deep Sensing (2023), showcase the results of our creative research, working with scientific ideas and environmental data to create immersive audio-visual experiences.

Atmospheric Forest is a virtual reality artwork visualising environmental processes and the impact of climate change on forests in the Swiss Alps. The work was created in collaboration with forest researchers and climate scientists from Switzerland and nominated for the Purvītis Prize 2021.
In the artwork, the viewer can not only walk through a virtual pine forest, but also see it from below, pass through the tree trunk (which looks like a flaming column of flickering particles) and rise high above the treetops... Emotional experiences are created by making visible invisible processes in nature such as tree growth in interaction with the environment; the work visualises data such as soil moisture, air temperature, the accumulation of resin in the bark of the tree (which serves as a defence system in case of insect attack or drought caused by climate change) and volatile emissions (which we recognise as the smell of conifer forests, especially in sunny and hot summers).

Deep Sensing is a multi-channel audio-video installation about the cosmic-scale interactions between the Solar system and the Earth's ecosystem. The work visualises and sonifies data from observations at the Irbene radio telescope into an immersive animated point cloud. The work has its roots in the legendary RIXC symposium on sound art and radio astronomy "RT-32. Acoustic Space Laboratory" (2001), held at the Irbene radio telescope just a few years after the formerly secret military facility came under the control of scientists.
Returning to the Irbene radio telescope today, the artists are faced with a different situation: after the grandiose space conquest plans of the last 20th century, we have finally "landed on Earth", or "at least we are on a different track", as the French philosopher Bruno Latour points out, reminding us that climate change and environmental problems are becoming increasingly critical.

In their quest to understand the contradictory fascination of this gigantic antenna today, the artists want to ask: why (again) is Earth not enough for us?

Through their artistic investigations, multisensory data visualisations and immersive artworks, Rasa Smite and Raitis Smits want to push the boundaries of climate research, highlighting the possible interactions between environmental science and space research, while contextualising it in a socio-ecological and geopolitical perspective. The immersive multi-sensory experience created by these works is an effort to make the complex science of climate and the impact and scale of environmental change more accessible to the public.

http://smitesmits.com

Rasa Smite and Raitis Smits are internationally renowned artists and innovators of new media culture in Latvia, working with science and new technologies. Rasa and Raitis are founders of the RIXC Center for New Media Culture and curators of the annual RIXC Art Science Festival (http://festival2024.rixc.org). Rasa Šmits is a professor at RTU Liepaja Academy, Raitis Šmits is a professor at the Art Academy of Lativa. Rasa and Raitis are also researchers and lecturers in Europe and the USA: Rasa Šmite is also a researcher at the Academy of Arts and Design Basel in Switzerland (since 2017), was a visiting professor at the HfG Academy of Arts and Design in Karlsruhe (Germany), and both together have taught courses at the MIT Faculty of Arts, Culture and Technology (ACT) (lecturers 2018-2021, guest lecturers since 2022) in Boston, USA.

In their artistic practice, they work as a duo of artists, collaboratively creating artworks that address the relationship between nature and technology, people and plants, ecology and climate change. Their artworks have been exhibited at the Latvian National Museum of Art in Riga, HeK in Basel, Ars Electronica in Linz, National Museum of Science and Technology in Stockholm, ZKM Media and Art Centre in Karslruhe, MIT Center for Theoretical Physics in Boston, Venice Architecture Biennale, OCAD Onsite Gallery in Toronto, Canada, ONX Onsassis Gallery in New York, USA, MEET Digital Culture Center in Milan, Taiwan National Science and Technology Center, and elsewhere.
In 2017, they received the Excellence in Culture Award from the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Latvia and have been nominated twice for the Purvītis Prize - in 2019 for thier solo exhibition "Fluctuations of the Microworlds" and in 2020 and 2021 for their artwork "Atmospheric Forest" in the exhibition "Critical Zones" (curators Peter Weibel, Bruno Latour), ZKM, Germany.

https://act.mit.edu/about/people/rasa-smite/

https://act.mit.edu/about/people/raitis-smits/