Supporter Benefit: Artist Book

“Portals I” is the first in a series of books featuring imagery, texts, and research from Laura Splan’s “A Guided Sublimation”, a multimedia meditation on posthuman subjectivities. Originally commissioned by the Vanderbilt Museum Planetarium, “A Guided Sublimation” premiered in 2023 as a multisensory immersive experience incorporating animations, sound, star projections, and scent. “Portals I” pairs the complete text of its narration with imagery from its animations. The layout of images functions like a “flip book” with hypnotic geometric bursts of color progressing through the pages. The poetically formatted text builds a relational matrix connecting micro and macro worlds. Conflated conventions of guided meditation and planetarium scripts create a liminal space situated between the biological and technological, sublime and absurd. The narrative traverses entanglements across space and time with aesthetic modalities conventionally used to represent the magnitude of the cosmos in a planetarium or to focus awareness on the body in meditation. The conceptual underpinnings of the project are drawn from epigenetics research examining environmental influences on gene expression. Science serves as “material” for the text of the narration as well as for prompts used to create AI-generated landscapes embedded in the images. A mesmerizing journey from the perspective of the molecular world of chromatin intimately traces a series of biophysical mechanisms such as DNA organization and methylation. Digitally layered and filtered 3D molecular models form the book’s kaleidoscopic imagery. The metallic surfaces of the models reflect AI-generated landscapes detectible in the fractal details of the patterns throughout the pages. Together, the images and text of “Portals” explore the complexities between what is invisible and in plain sight, nature and nurture, past and present.