Local Binaries

Lauren Moffatt / Australia

Every person you meet holds a world inside them, what does yours look like? This was the question artist Lauren Moffatt asked nine female-identifying individuals originating from across the world in order to define the blueprints for the universe inside Local Binaries. Drawing inspiration from meditation and art therapy techniques that encourage embodied mindfulness – like body scanning and body mapping – participants were asked to focus on their inner state and interpret it as a landscape. They imagined geological forms, sounds, plant-life, weather systems and architectures to delineate the emotional and physiological sensations they felt. They then relayed the scene to the artist as if describing scenery. The artist recreated elements from each testimonial using a game engine, interweaving them into a sprawling landscape that can be accessed and interacted with via smartphones and other handheld devices.

Local Binaries is an augmented reality world that explores the way people experience psychological and emotional states in a spatial way, as if they were miniature landscapes inside of us. If we search deeply through our experience, is it possible to see our natural and built human world reflected in the cycles and processes of our thoughts and feelings? We could see this as a psychological journey into the geography of the mind, but inversely we could also use this thought experiment as an opportunity to look for the parts of the world around us that reflect our inner states – for better or for worse. Following the extended periods of staggered lockdowns seen all over the world over the past 24 months, with the menace of more to come in the future, it seems an appropriate time to look for a vocabulary for describing these tiny worlds we carry around with us, which have grown so much bigger in solitude, and to find a meeting point where we can experience and describe them collectively. Local Binaries was conceived as such a place.

Here, on empty roads and pathways we see strange tiny shapes roaming, as we approach with our device we recognize that they are little characters. They may stop and look at us, as we draw closer we may hear them speaking, describing their surroundings, we may see them try to hide, see them engulfed in a tornado or surrounded by sea creatures or swimming through the air. We see them occupying a strange hybrid place built using an eclectic mix of handmade and digitally constructed elements, paint strokes overlaying textures generated by a neural networks. This collaged fantastical space reflects the panorama of human emotion as well as the eclectic nature of our accumulated experiences that color our internal lives, full of contrasting textures, rhythms, and contradictory movements.

Visitors are free to roam in Local Binaries. As in nature, there is no beginning and end, no preordained path to be followed. They only need the curiosity and observational skills required to explore its corners to find all of its hidden details: a voyage that will take them on a parallel journey into the colours and contours of their own inner universes.