Remedios’ Terrarium is a responsive environment, a group show, and a conversation made public. it’s a set of diverse responses to the fable of autopoiesis, imagining living systems as palimpsests of organic plants, woven textile, filament, air, projected video, sound, sensor data, and occasionally, people. It’s a group show in which individual creators and collectives affiliated with the Topological Media Lab (TML) have responded to a call about the themes of a terrarium and delicate life, of the Gallery as a vessel made porous mixing outside and inside, of matter in constant alchemical transformation. Our goal is not to make objects or even particular pieces of media, but events. Certainly in the course of making an event, we produce objects and media and, most importantly, some latent behavior, but all as elements conditioning an event. Its continuously evolving responsive environment changes weather and behavior according to the hour and the day, and according to what’s happening inside or outside its porous boundaries. We arrange our objects in a physical space to leverage the unbounded corporeal intuition that visitors bring with them, so the remedios’ terrarium is an architectural experiment as well as an event.

The Remedios’ Terrarium is also a set of conversations, articulated in things and events. It’s a philosophical investigation carried out in the form of material experiments made of experimental modes of matter. We create things, media instruments, and kinetic plants, “spoken” from diverse perspectives. We can be noisy, divergent, and even contentious, but making and exhibiting remedios’ terrarium — the 100 day long event — requires us to create a common boundary object together. As you walk about the Gallery, you’ll encounter individual and collective echoes of questions and speculations reaching ten years back: how can we make compelling events without convention? What makes some events dead and others live? What is a gesture when we do not assume bodies a priori? how do conventions and bodies come into being or dissolve in the continuously flowing world?

The main Gallery acts as an alchemical vessel mixing multiple species of matter responding to activity inside and outside the space: calligraphic video and sound, plastic cells, structured light, and in certain moments, performers. Other chambers contain sculptural reflections on the terrarium. We compose the exhibition as two and a half week long event breathing according to clocks as well as contingent states.

Remedios' Terrarium features works by affiliates of the Topological Media Lab from Special Individualized Programs, Humanities PhD Program, MFA Studio Arts program, Design Computation Arts, Computer Science, Contemporary Dance, Electroacoustics, Theatre, and the University of Manitoba / Department of Architecture, and Pneuma.