Timothy Collins & Reiko Goto Collins

Reiko’s research focuses on the relationship between humans, other living things and our changing environment. Tim is interested in the way that changes to climate and environment mobilize critical thinking about nature and culture relationships. The Collins + Goto Studio are recognized for long-term projects that involve socially engaged environmental research and practice; with a key additional focus on empathic relationships with more-than-human others. Methods include reading and writing, sculpture, and the use of a range of media, and technologies. The Studio produces artworks, sound works, video, exhibitions, and installations as well as seminars, workshops, and publications. Arts-led dialogue and a theory-informed approach is essential to the studio’s approach to environmental art working. The artists collaborate with musicians, planners, scientists, and technologists as well as historians and philosophers to conceptualize and realize work that explores changes in our time.

During their residency at the MQ, Tim Collins and Reiko Goto will work on two projects:
A weekly practice where we explore trees in Vienna with the HAKOTO body instruments, listening to the breath of trees. Two months of work will result in a publication and audio/video record of arboreal sampling and an ongoing dialogue about what it means to share a place with other living things; how technology enables empathic exchange when language is not possible, finally there is a question of what the sound and rhythm of life itself might be.
The second project is focused on Oak Biodiversity in the UK. This involves an attempt to develop an artistic response to a recent study led by Dr Ruth Mitchell of the James Hutton Institute here in Scotland that quantifies all of the 2,301 species that comprise native oak woods. There is a question about how to present this complex and fascinating record or interrelationship using artistic methods informed by new technologies and process philosophy.