Ancestral Intelligence is a living pictograph, created for the UP HERE Festival in Sudbury and one of my first works built in TouchDesigner. The piece reads the land and renders what it finds as a moving pictograph across 3D-scanned rock, a picture of the knowledge Indigenous communities carry of the places they live. That knowledge comes from the ones who came before us and from the land itself.

The work treats the land as a teacher and the machine as a listener. It holds a hope for technology: that it can help us pay closer attention to the world instead of pulling us away from it.