Bianca Shonee Arroyo-Kreimes^CR/QC

Shonee (born Bianca Shonee Arroyo-Kreimes) is a Canadian-Costa Rican digital media artist who sees the potential in video and speculative fiction to depict artificial life. Growing up on the edge of a jungle has fueled her practice, as she now strives to reestablish nature’s place in her life given her current status as an urbanite in Montréal. Her work wields technology as a contrasting metaphor to pin biological and technological life forms against one another, since she perceives our hesitancy to accept emerging technological life as similar to our unconscious desire to separate from the already-present other in our lives: nature. In the virtual worlds she creates, artificial creatures borrow shapes, colours, and stories from the natural world, while remaining singular. This choice is intended to inspire a newly discovered appreciation of the endangered, non-human world we too often take for granted, since her portrayals embody humankind’s seemingly objective but ultimately narrow misunderstanding of the lives of plants and animals.

Bianca Shonee Arroyo-Kreimes ^CR/QC — Field of Reeds

What would it be like to live in a world where all non-human living things were extinct? Shonee’s Field Of Reeds is an augmented-reality experience inviting participants to make connections with the urban spaces they see every day. In the place where real meets virtual, once-thriving speculative ecosystems are unveiled. Set in an alternate future, the app transforms modern life into a vibrant jungle once again shared with nature through the renewal of a lost relationship with Mother Earth.