MM + DB
Daniel Brownell and Miranda Moss met in March 2019 when she started working as a soldering monkey at Daniel’s hydroponic and automated plant systems business GrowOpz in Cape Town, South Africa. Since, they have started to develop bio / tech research-based art projects together. They were awarded a Pro Helvetia research residency grant in April 2019, where they worked on a variety of diverse interdisciplinary projects, as well as setting up an interactive, immersive installation at Platform’s Motherfucker X-mas Party in Vaasa, and running workshops with the public, specifically children, to teach the basics of electronic art in a playful way.
MIRANDA MOSS
Miranda Moss is a transdisciplinary artist whose practice toys with the representation of Nature as a pure and extra-cultural phenomenon. Largely preoccupied with tensions around artificial / natural, the land is used as a medium to explore how personal, political, economic and visual value structures are projected onto exterior environments. When not conducting “research”, she often employs a process that could be described as techno-alchemy; her works combining sublime, magical elements with everyday, banal ones by frequently incorporating found objects, recycled, accessible technologies, and ephemeral, natural processes.
Her practice has become increasingly interdisciplinary, and has seen her collaborate with scientists, engineers, designers and mechatronic artists in recent years. She has exhibited extensively in South Africa, as well as at La Gaite Lyrique in Paris, Kikk festival in Belgium, Cinekid Festival in Amsterdam, Woelab in Togo and la Companie in Marseille. In 2017 she was the recipient of the Pro Helvetia / Artists-in-Labs residency in Zurich, where she was stationed in a phytopathology laboratory at the Swiss Federal Institute for Snow, Forest and Landscape. 2018 saw her first participation in the International Symposium on Electronic Art (ISEA). In 2019, she was nominated for the PCS art prize, and was the recipient of The New Technological Art Awards’ (NTAA) Audience Choice Award, which was held at Zebrastraat in Ghent in November. She is currently studying a Masters degree Design+Change (sustainable design with a focus on ecological and social complexities) in Vaxjo, Sweden.
Her full exhibition CV can be found here: http://mirandamoss.com/about
DANIEL BROWNELL
One of Daniel Brownell’s goals is to simplify the latest advances from technical and academic works so that they can be implemented using common, off-the-shelf components. Finding cheap solutions, popularising insightful ideas, and raising awareness to increase adoption of new technology is key to improving public education and resiliency when faced with environmental crises.
Daniel runs an innovative hydroponics and horticultural lighting company in Cape Town, working on and testing various experimental designs that are improving the state of the art. He is working towards fabricating an open source PCB to enable low cost environmental and lighting control for food computing projects. His experiments involve using camera and sensor input and computer vision.
Daniel has a Bachelors of Computer Science with honours, from California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, where his senior thesis entailed the implementation of a distributed framework for genetic programming. He has used his skills to automate and architect solutions in the automotive, telecommunications, education, employee benefits, banking and healthcare industries. He is currently the lead developer for ICON, South Africa’s primary network of oncologists.
He has also dabbled in artistic endeavours, bringing the first LED matrix artwork, The Freakin Beacon, to the desert art festival Afrika Burn in 2013, and has since collaborated with the LSDome crew, the first to create a 2880-pixel Dome in 2016 and a 5760-pixel Dome 2.0 in 2017.
CONTACT
miranda.and.a.moss@gmail.com | daniel@zoiz.org