Timothy Weaver is a new media artist whose work is directly related to life sciences and what he calls “ecological memory.” In his work “Hylaea: Campephilus,” he explores the lost ecological memory of the Campephilus bird, a sacred species whose endangered future is tied to that of the American forests. “Hylaea” refers to the mythical lost forests of ancient Greece, as well as to Humboldt’s exploration of the forests of America. The work is a compilation of large-scale prints, videos and ambient sound from the bird’s lost habitat. Timothy speaks of the “residues of extinction” and working with DNA imaging that results in an accurate representation of what the presumably extinct bird would have actually looked like.
He writes:
“The hope is that audience engagement with such immersive experiences may re-mediate the patterns of lost ecological memory as a means of facilitating a discourse into our present tense state of ecologcial consiousness in a time of cascading extinctions.”
See more of Timothy’s work at www.primamateria.org