Hylozoic Series: Sibyl

Beesley’s ‘Hylozoic Series’ is an interdisciplinary body of work that integrates lightweight, digitally fabricated textile structures and interactive microprocessor technology (touch sensors, LEDs, shape-memory alloy). These projects are a hybrid of sculpture, engineering, experimental chemistry and architecture. Working with the concept of hylozoism – the belief that all matter in the universe has a life of its own – Beesley creates interactive environments that respond to the actions of the audience, offering a vision of how buildings in the future might move, think and feel. His built environments begin to address the subject/object relationship in such a confounding way because the so-called objects are now responding to human presence, thus giving the work almost subject status.

Hylozoic Series: Sibyl (2012) was presented in Building 142, in the Industrial Precinct on Cockatoo Island for the 18th Biennale of Sydney (2012).

Artist Statement
The spaces in the Hylozoic Series (2011) contain tens of thousands of lightweight digitally fabricated components fitted with microprocessors and proximity sensors that react to human presence. This responsive environment functions like a giant lung that breathes in and out around its occupants. Arrays of touch sensors and shapememory alloy kinetic components create waves of empathic motion, luring visitors into a fragile forest of light. The structural scaffolds within these environments tend to use tessellated geometries that can accommodate distortions and failure within their fabrics. Similar to the functions of a living system, embedded machine intelligence allows human interaction to trigger breathing, caressing, and swallowing motions. This interaction also influences the growth of a primitive chemical metabolism that circulates within vessels running throughout the meshwork. Subtle impacts register air moving around the body of the viewer, changes in surrounding magnetic fields disturbed when passing. Interaction fosters awareness of many presences and many dimensions. Rather than human-centred power, ethics of mutual relations within wide and sometimes alien systems are implied by this work.