Project
Breathing with Tara is an immersive installation combining laser-cut sculpture, generative physics simulations, and a gentle soundscape that offers a meditation on the breath of the biosphere. Breathing with Tara invites us to breathe, to rest, and to contemplate Tara, who appears in a green body that represents nature’s infinitely varied forms of life, awareness, and beauty: seas, plants, lakes, forests, rivers, mountains, mists, animals, natural cycles, and regenerative power. Tara offers us a kind of mirror, enabling us to see aspects of ourselves reflected in the natural world, and aspects of the natural world reflected in ourselves. She is being breathed, just like us. She follows cycles of sleeping and waking, just like us. She goes through phases of growth and decay, just like us. She is mostly water, sustained by an intricate network of rivers and streams, just like us. She is composed of a diverse range of organisms, just like us. She breathes us, and we breathe her. She lives in us, and we live in her. As she evolves, we evolve, and as we evolve, she evolves – a cosmic dance wherein creativity explores its own potential.
Artist Bio
David Glowacki is a cross-disciplinary researcher, artist, musician, and author. His work explores the frontiers of science, technology, and aesthetics. His immersive digital artworks, which encourage us to reimagine ourselves as light, have been experienced by more than 200,000 people across four continents. He is the recipient of many prestigious scientific research awards, including a Royal Society research fellowship, ERC consolidator grant, Philip Leverhulme Award, Oportunius fellowship, and a recent grant from the Tiny Blue Dot Foundation. Originally from Milwaukee, David studied his undergraduate at UPenn, his MA in cultural theory from the University of Manchester (UK) and his PhD in molecular physics from the University of Leeds (UK). His art studio is in Santiago de Compostela (Northwest Spain), where he also serves as director of the Intangible Realities Laboratory (IRL). Discover more of David’s work at glow-wacky.com and theIRL.org.
Science Collaboration
As an ecohydrologist, Maoya Bassiouni’s research combines physical theory and ecosystem ecology with data science to understand how vegetation interacts with environmental change and how these interactions influence water, carbon, and energy cycles from soil, plant, to the biosphere. Her research analyzes and integrates data from hundreds of global eddy covariance tower sites in FLUXNET to diagnose and synthesize land-atmosphere interactions, vegetation water-carbon tradeoffs and quantify key eco-evolutionary principles that enhance our understanding and predictive capacity of complex environmental systems and ecosystem services.
News and Activities
January, 2025: Arts Residency with Micheal Flood and Melissa Warner, to design the laser cut Tara, Melbourne Australia
November 10, 2024: Audiovisual performance, Yantric Fields, Museum of Consciousness, Oxford University, UK
December 12, 2024, Presentation, Contemplating the Biosphere’s Breath to Dissolve Climate Anxiety, American Geophysical Union Annual Meeting, Washington DC (news story, abstract)
December 9, 2024, Dyantra demo and presentation, Catchment Science Symposium, Washington DC (news story)
September 25, 2024: Field visit, Dutch Slough Marsh Gilbert Tract flux tower, CA (news story)
September 21, 2024: Installation and audiovisual meditation, Tonglen with the Biosphere’s Breath, Alembic Equinox event, Berkeley, CA (news story)
September 4, 2024: Artist presentation and Dyantra demo, Ameriflux annual meeting, Berkeley, CA (news story)
August-October, 2025: Breathing Corn, flux data visualization, Harvest Art show, Alembic, Berkeley, CA
August, 2024: Collaboration with Micheal Flood on laser cut Tara prototype, Santiago de Compostela, Spain August 6, 2024: Artist talk and Dyantra demo, MO:DEM festival, Croatia
July-August, 2024: Dyantra code development residency with Maoya Bassiouni, Santiago de Compostela, Spain (news story)
Artwork
Flux Mandalas: Print series, visualizations of carbon dioxide, water vapor, and energy seasonal cycles from FLUXNET data around the world, each creating unique patterns that portray ecosystems as radiant compassionate beings.(See More)
Tonglen with the Biosphere’s Breath: Installation and audiovisual meditation of ecosystem-atmosphere interactions, inviting us to practice dissolving boundaries and exchanging self with other. Visuals include Dyantra simulations brought to life with data from the Mayberry wetland flux tower and fog-forest video. (See more)
Dyantra: Digital art software using real-time open-source physics simulation code which enables intricate geometric patterns to be evolved in a field of Gaussian attractors resulting in dynamics and complexity, which follows an intrinsic vibrational rhythm reminiscent of breath. (See more)
Acknowledgements
