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Based on a radical reworking of an episode in the 1835 novella Lenz by Georg Büchner, the project explores consciousness as an atmosphere, a setting rather than an object located in a mind. The original novella dramatises a journey across the Vogesen mountains during which time the narrator, immersed in the vertiginous landscape, is unable to distinguish their own body from that of the natural world, losing their sense of self in the process. Büchner’s fragment operates as an implicit challenge to human-centred notions of consciousness crystallised in the Enlightenment philosophies of his time. Using a particle generation graphics engine, Vogesen I & II reconfigure this challenge, creating a series of computer-generated atmospheres, whose undulating refrains articulate a machine consciousness, interwoven by a human voice, evoking how human and non-human consciousness are a function of each other.

Vogesen I & II are experimental components for the Nebula project, supported under the Australian Research Council’s Discovery Grant scheme.