Hi everyone! I’m Yandell Walton, a Naarm-based artist working across digital media, immersive installation, and environmental art. My practice explores more-than-human ecologies through technologies such as moving image, real-time systems, and responsive environments. I’m particularly interested in how we might reframe our relationship to the natural world by decentralising human agency and creating systems that are shaped by nonhuman forces.

During this residency, I’ll be developing a series of experimental works that investigate data-driven digital ecosystem built in Unreal Engine, shaped by live environmental data sourced. Blurring the lines between the organic and the technological, the project aims to present a speculative posthuman landscape in constant flux, an ecosystem co-authored by human infrastructure, nonhuman life, and artificial intelligences.

These works will explore how environmental data, particularly from water systems, can animate and shape digital ecosystems. I’ll be working with water not only as material and concept, but as agent, asking how flows, rhythms, and environmental shifts in water bodies can be translated into visual and temporal language.

Using 3D forms modelled from various forest environments I’ve visited, such as the Daintree and Wollemi, with upcoming research on K’gari, I’ll begin experimenting with how these digital ecologies can move and respond to live or recorded data from waterways, rainfall, or humidity patterns. The aim is to allow the data itself to guide the tone, movement, and atmosphere of each work, creating an evolving dialogue between digital forms and the environments they emerge from.

This residency offers a space to test new technical processes, expand my knowledge of LED electronics, and explore how sculptural screen-based works can function as living, responsive systems. I’ll be using this page to share experiments, reflections, and progress as I go.

Thanks for being here! Excited to share the journey.

Yandell