The Bradbury Art Museum (BAM) at Arkansas State University will present “more-than-human,” an international exhibition of immersive and interactive media art, through Oct. 9.

Curated by Jane Tingley, artist, curator and chair of Computational Arts at York University in Toronto, “more-than-human” brings together artists working at the intersection of art, science, Indigenous worldviews and technology. Through video, immersive projection, virtual environments, sound, scent, scientific data and other sensory experiences, the exhibition asks visitors to reconsider the assumption that humans stand at the center of the natural world.

Rather than presenting nature as a passive resource or backdrop to human activity, the exhibition asks audiences to encounter forests, plants, water, microorganisms, insects, fungi and atmospheric systems as participants in complex networks of relationships. Technology becomes a means of making visible—and sometimes audible or tangible—phenomena that normally exist beyond the limits of human perception.

The exhibit asks visitors to reconsider some very basic assumptions about our place in the world, said Julia Wintner, director of the Bradbury Art Museum. 

“These questions feel particularly meaningful in Northeast Arkansas, a region shaped by agriculture, environmental change and strong relationships between people, land and community,” said Wintner. “How do humans relate to the world around us? What responsibilities do we have toward other forms of life? And how might technology help us imagine more connected futures?”

The exhibition features work by Ursula Biemann, Marko Cindric, Lindsey French, Dolleen Tisawii’ashii Manning + Mary Bunch, Suzanne Morrissette, François Quévillon, Rasa Smite and Raitis Smits, and Jane Tingley with Hrysovalanti Maheras and Ilze Briede (Kavi). 

Among the works on view, Rasa Smite and Raitis Smits’ “Atmospheric Forest” transforms scientific data gathered from a drought-stressed Alpine forest into an immersive visualization of the relationships among trees, climate change and the atmosphere. Ursula Biemann’s “Forest Mind” draws from the artist’s collaboration with the Indigenous Inga community in Colombia to bring Indigenous knowledge into dialogue with Western scientific approaches to plant intelligence. François Quévillon’s “Growth and Decay” moves through animal, vegetal, insect and fungal perspectives, while other works invite visitors to experience landscapes through sound, scent, vibration, interactive media and altered forms of perception.

The exhibition grew from Tingley’s ongoing research project, “Foresta-Inclusive,” begun in 2018, which seeks to reconnect human experience with the forest and foster greater empathy and responsibility toward the natural world. Tingley argues that art, science and technology can provide ways of perceiving complex systems and forms of communication—including scent, vibration, and color—that ordinarily remain outside human sensory experience.

For Wintner, bringing the exhibition to Arkansas is also the culmination of a longer curatorial relationship. She first encountered “more-than-human” at OCAD University’s Onsite Gallery in Toronto in 2023, where its immersive projections, layered soundscapes, interactive media and combination of technological experimentation and human care made a lasting impression. Her subsequent conversations with Tingley about art, technology, education, museums, artists and audiences ultimately led to the exhibition’s presentation at BAM.

“more-than-human” invites visitors not simply to observe these environments but to slow down, listen, sense and reconsider their own position within them. As Tingley writes in the exhibition catalogue, the works ask fundamental questions about what it means to be alive, to possess agency, and to enter into dialogue with beings and systems that do not share human language or human experiences of time and space.

The exhibit, curated by Jane Tingley, will be on display through Oct. 9 at Bradbury Art Museum.

About the Bradbury Art Museum

The Bradbury Art Museum at Arkansas State University provides students, faculty, schools and communities throughout Northeast Arkansas and the surrounding region with access to contemporary art, exhibitions, educational programs and the university’s permanent collection. Through exhibitions such as “more-than-human,” BAM connects international artistic practices with questions that resonate locally while creating opportunities for interdisciplinary teaching, research, dialogue and community engagement.