Seed Theory: Terrain 1

SEED THEORY by Chinese-Canadian artist Sougwen Chung is a series seeded from human movement, glacial textures, and the Earth as seen from above.

SEED THEORY draws inspiration from the research of the late microbiologist Lynn Margulis. Her pioneering theory of planetary symbiosis—and the Earth as a co-creative and co-regulatory system—challenges conventional views of human beings and technology as separate from nature. In her work, the Earth is a self-regulating complex system involving the biosphere, the atmosphere, the hydrosphere, and the pedosphere, tightly coupled as an evolving system.

In SEED THEORY, the components of Margulis’ Gaian system—the biosphere, atmosphere, hydrosphere, and pedosphere—are collated into a training model of views of satellites from the Earth's exosphere. They are recomposed as terrains. Each work in the SEED THEORY series is composed of a terrain and an organism. The foregrounded sculptural, organic lines wind through the images, referencing a sensuous cybernetic organism in form and texture. The organism is a construction of interweaving human gestural data and textures from the biosphere captured during the artist's recent field research in the Arctic. The organism and the terrain collapse vantage points of geographic scales, their contours unbound, oscillating perspectives of figure and ground. The work speculates on a possible future in which technology is not extractive of nature but an integrated, regenerative component of it.

The themes in SEED THEORY continue the artist's research in alternative constructions of human, machine, and ecology. The work integrates gestures from the artist's Meridian dataset—part of the training data for the next generation of the collaborative drawing system D.O.U.G.

The SEED THEORY series was incubated during the Ignota Books residency, focused on Lynn Margulis and Gaian Systems, and further explored during a research seminar hosted by The Gaia Art Foundation in 2022.