TULLY ARNOT'S DIGITAL FOREST AT UNDERBELLY ARTS FESTIVAL

Digital Forest / Nervous Plants from Tully Arnot on Vimeo.

Underbelly Arts Festival kicks off this weekend on Cockatoo Island and we are looking forward to seeing Tully Arnot's brand new artwork, Digital Forest, which was successfully realised through the support of his Pozible campaign and will be brought to life for the first time.

Digital Forest is an extension of his solo exhibition, Trace Etc, at Artereal Gallery in March, which developed on the artist's investigations into the blurring between digital reality and real life and the tensions between CGI/Artificial Intelligence/robotics and more organic or natural elements.

Digital Forest uses our connection with objects to explore the alienation that exists in an increasingly connected, but ultimately disconnected world.  By integrating complex technologies with everyday components, the artist merges the familiar and the unfamiliar. His work creates an uncanny feeling, indicative of the isolating nature of our digital existence.

Underbelly Arts develops and presents work from the boldest new voices in Australian art and was established in 2007 as a response to the number of artists working out of their bedrooms and in warehouses, in isolation. As a kind of social experiment, it sought to bring all those artists under the one roof and expose them to one another, and to new audiences.

Earlier this year, we produced a short in-studio film with Tully Arnot about his practice, which you can watch here. 

TULLY ARNOT // IS ANNOUNCED AS A FINALIST TO JOHN FRIES 2015, LAUNCHES POZIBLE CAMPAIGN AND A VIDEO INTERVIEW

Congratulations to Tully Arnot, who has been announced a finalist to the John Fries Award 2015, one of Australia and New Zealand's most covetable awards for emerging contemporary artists.

Tully Arnot is, indisputably, one of Australia's busiest practicing artists. Since picking up the Inaugural NAB Private Wealth Emerging Artist Award in association with Art Month Sydney in September, he has presented numerous solo exhibitions (including Trace Etc at Artereal gallery in March 2015) and group exhibitions. In March, he was also awarded the prestigious Marten Bequest Travelling Scholarship, awarding the artist $20,000 over two years.  

As part of his solo exhibition, Trace Etc, at Artereal Gallery, Tully spoke In Conversation with Sydney Contemporary 15 Director, Barry Keldoulis and was also filmed providing further insight into the work in this exhibition from his studio at Redfern's 107 Projects (available to view above).

This week, Tully Arnot also launched a Pozible campaign in a bid to raise money for a project, Digital Forest, that he would like to get off the ground for Underbelly Arts 2015.

In his explanation on the crowdsourcing platform, Arnot elaborates on his intentions for the project: 

"Digital Forest is a new sculptural installation created for Underbelly Arts Festival 2015 on Cockatoo Island, Sydney. The artwork will consist of 300+ 'robotic' plants which use light sensors, servo motors and Arduino micro-controllers to create an interactive relationship between the audience and this electronic foliage.

This installation develops on a previous work Nervous Plants, winner of the 2014 NAB Private Wealth Emerging Artist Award. The new work will refine the technology that I developed in that work, as well as increase the complexity of the interactive components and greatly expand the scale of the work. "