Sonic Bloom
August 4, 2025
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Sonic Bloom is a lively interactive installation that transforms movement and sound into the growth of digital flora based on native plants local to B.C. It offers an opportunity to reflect on our connection to the nature in our own backyard. The piece uses a body tracking camera to allow participants to interact directly with a large-scale projection, ideally outdoors. Everyone will grow a unique flowering plant native to B.C., combining into a garden that evolves with their every movement. The music of Ruby Singh’s Polyphonic Garden will fill the air and activate the flowers as they pulse with each beat. Singh created this Western Canadian Music Award winning album over the course of two years of travels to six biomes throughout so-called “British Columbia.” Using biosonification, Singh raises songs from indigenous flora and fungi, transforming bio-electricity into midi data to inform pitch and rhythm. The melodies are then mixed with field recordings and unique instrumentation. What emerges are complexly layered sonic ecologies of connection to the natural world, where Singh imagines how we might move towards right relations with these generous lands, waters and skies. The installation will culminate with alive performance by Ruby Singh. Grounded in local ecologies, Sonic Bloom is a multisensory immersive and interactive experience that connects participants to nature through their bodies. Their active participation in the piece reminding them of their role in shifting our relationship with the more than human world all around us.
About the Artist:
Biome is the collective multisensory, immersive work of Ruby Singh and John Desnoyers-Stewart grounded in rewilding human relationships with the more-than-human. Ruby Singh is a multi award winning performer, composer and producer residing on the unceded territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, and səl̓ílwətaʔɬ/Tsleil-Waututh Nations (Vancouver BC.). His creativity crosses the boundaries of music, poetry, photography and film engaging with mythos, memory, justice and fantasy. In 2022 Singh received the Lieutenant Governor’s Jubilee Award for excellence in Art and Music. In 2023 he received his inaugural Juno nomination and he won both the WCMA award for best Global Music Artist of the Year and BC Touring Council's Artist of the Year. Singh believes in art’s ability to reimagine futures, to repurpose aesthetic freedoms toward civil and environmental justice. John Desnoyers-Stewart is an interdisciplinary artist/researcher and postdoctoral fellow at the University of British Columbia’s (UBC) Critical Future Studio/Lab. He integrates artistic practice with engineering knowledge to create innovative artworks to connect people and evoke new perspectives on our shared physical reality. He has exhibited his multi-user mixed reality installations, Star-Stuff, Eve 3.0, and more in over80 exhibitions at art galleries and festivals around the world. Through his art and research, he explores positive social applications of mixed reality, investigating its potential to connect us more deeply to ourselves, each other, and our surrounding physical reality.
Follow Ruby Singh online:
Website: www.rubysingh.ca
Instagram: @rubysingh_
