From Microbes to Ghosts

In Spring 2025, Pierce Warnecke and Matthew Biederman spent ten days in rural eastern Latvia as artists in residence through the tehknē + Skaņu Mežs program. Guided by botanist Liga Pentjusa from the University of Riga, they explored protected forests, marshes and peat bogs. The artists conducted botanical surveys using photogrammetry and field recordings to document endangered environments. Their work engages these places across sonic and visual scales, offering alternative perspectives on human and non-human relationships and ecological interconnectedness. Their conversation below offers insight into their practices and this project.

Pierce Warnecke: What is the idea behind Phytomorphic Topologies ? Is it more a continuation of your previous works, a break or both?

Matthew Biederman: Always both. Conceptually it continues our earlier work Spillover , where we tried to give the land some agency in shaping the piece. However, there is also a practical break; whereas Spillover relied on traditional instruments and musicians, it required more composition and scoring. This new work feels freer; we are ‘playing’ the material more directly, especially visually creating room for improvisational moments.

PW: Phytomorphic Topologies is definitely more open. One thing I like is that we prepared around 20 sound and video environments but we only have time to explore five or six during a performance.

PW: How would you describe the difference between working with traditional imagery in nature and photogrammetry? Since the final result is delayed through reconstruction, does that change your relationship to the environment? Does it affect immersion?

MB: Collecting imagery for photogrammetry or Gaussian splatting is very different from making photographs or films. Framing almost disappears; instead, you think about coverage of a subject. You still consider exposure and focus, but not time as you would with video or film. I am thinking instead about overlap, angles and scale. While the image isn’t more or less ‘real’, the framing shifts, and I’m interested in the edge cases — moments where the illusion of realism breaks. These renderings can appear hyper-real until a slight shift in viewpoint reveals its constructed nature. That tension is present even before we manipulate the point cloud during performance.

PW: Can you sense where those edges will appear while filming, or do they only show up later? I remember one surprise when reflections in water produced a second mirrored 3D forest under the surface.

MB: I began to recognise where those effects might happen. When I began exploring radiance field techniques, the process itself was fascinating, but eventually I started looking for the points where the technology fails or reveals itself. Surprises like the reflections or the angles where the camera can’t reach, keep the process exciting.

The act of shooting is somewhat like field recording: you slow down to carefully cover a subject. It takes time, which I see as positive. Photogrammetry requires lingering in one place much longer than photography, allowing a deeper focus on the environment.

Technically, Gaussian splatting layers coloured different sized, soft edged ellipses in 3D space until a representation emerges — not of the object itself but of how light interacted with it and the camera. It evolved from NeRF techniques. Unlike basic point clouds, each point stores many parameters — position, rotation, transparency, spherical harmonics. The computational process becomes noticeable, so as you begin to understand how the image space is built, you can consider how to shoot for the effect you want rather than always relying on digital post processing.

PW: True — during our week in Latvia you returned three or four times to the same location to rescan it, often alone.

MB: Much of my work normally happens behind a desk, so the opportunity of being outdoors, thinking and working during this residency was such a privilege. In this performance I wanted to go beyond simply representing nature through images and instead evoke energy within nature — forces we rarely perceive but can imagine. This relates to your process as well, where recording artefacts suggest sounds beyond what we actually can hear.

PW: How do you navigate representation and abstraction in Phytomorphic Topologies ? And how does that relate to your broader practice?

MB: I’ve worked extensively with pure abstraction, but recently I’ve wanted a middle ground. Experimental filmmakers like Paul Clipson, Bruce Baillie and Stan Brakhage move from representation into abstraction: through layering, natural imagery or direct physical materials. I ask how working digitally I might approach similar ideas like how can technologies built for realism also generate abstraction? I like moving between recognisability that drifts or shifts into the unreal, hopefully matching the transformations in your sound.

PW: Yes, and there’s also a long delay between capture, processing and evaluating the model — much less immediate than recording sound.

MB: Exactly. Watching the software build the models feels almost magical. Because so much data is involved, for now, real-time systems have limited resolution. When you zoom very tightly or look at areas the camera (or you) couldn't reach, the representation breaks down into abstraction. It is just as if you were looking closely at a painting, seeing individual brushstrokes that make up a representation. I enjoy that an image can be both hyperreal and abstract depending on perspective.

PW: How important is immersion in your work — physical experience versus intellectual reflection?

MB: I dislike how the term ‘immersion’ is used in digital art today. I often feel more immersed in a book than in works marketed as immersive. For me a performance is a physio-emotional experience. Everyone experiences it differently, but there is a collective physical and emotional response when something resonates. Live performance contains a unique energy — performers are already immersed, and ideally the audience joins them in an experience that blurs sensual and intellectual reactions.

PW: So immersion is the ability to project oneself into another world proposed by the artist?

MB: Maybe it’s closer to getting lost in something. In digital art the word has been absorbed by VR and similar technologies, but in performance I value immersion as an act where a performer is deeply absorbed and brings the audience along with them.

PW: Do you see technology as an expressive medium or mainly as a tool within your practice?

MB: Primarily a tool that can become expressive. A computer is a general instrument used to build more specific expressive tools. Paintbrushes are also technologies, with their own expressive possibilities. I build software instruments, and each performance uses a slightly different one. The expressivity lies in those instruments rather than the computer itself. I often think of Lars von Trier and Jørgen Leth’s film The Five Obstructions — constraints generate creativity. My limitations often come from being self-taught as a programmer or from hardware limits. I try to think like an artist rather than a software engineer.

PW: I often worry about crossing the line between making art and endlessly building tools for art. It’s easy to get lost in tool-making and never finish the work.

PW: Are there social or political concerns in your practice? How do they appear in work that is abstract and non-narrative?

MB: Each project begins somewhat independently, but many touch on how technology is used or imposed within society. I’m interested in whether it can also become liberating. That can manifest itself through intense abstract experiences or through moments of sublime beauty that offer escape. Other projects directly address the military-industrial origins of much of the technology used in interactive and digital art — connections that I believe are impossible to ignore.

PW: How do you approach sound when creating an audiovisual performance? Do image and sound develop simultaneously?

MB: It varies. My first experiences of performing were within club culture as a VJ, where I followed the sound directly, and I considered experimentation in a live setting as a sketchbook. Today, the process is more structured. I prefer leaving space so sound and image can align naturally rather than constantly matching one another. Occasional strong synchronisations can be powerful, but not constantly. I enjoy accidental connections. Collaboration is also central — for instance with our work different ideas that might be aurally focused or visually focused come to the forefront, often within the same piece, existing next to one another. Experimentation like that requires trust and openness rather than strict direction.

PW: Collaboration is politically important for me as well. I prefer shared decision-making rather than hierarchical structures, which can reproduce patriarchal / capitalist / military forms of organisation.

MB: Agreed — we see the consequences of those hierarchies everywhere.

PW: Regarding Phytomorphic Topologies , did you begin with a plant subject or a technical framework? How did working in the field change your ideas?

MB: I wanted to explore a smaller scale than our previous project Spillover , which focused on large environments. While researching Latvia we discovered images of rare bryophytes (mosses) which immediately fit this shift in scale. At the same time, the transition from NeRFs to Gaussian splats was happening. I usually avoid adopting technology just because it’s new, but here it aligned perfectly with our concept. Working on site shaped the process: after capturing material I would evaluate the results and sometimes return the next day to reshoot certain areas, depending on weather or lighting.

PW: Yes, we both spent much more time in the field for this piece.

The work is figurative in subject but abstract in form. How did you connect those elements?

MB: My interest in Gaussian splatting is not its realism, but what happens at its limits — extreme close-ups or poorly captured edges. At those points the image becomes painterly and expressive. In performance I mostly explore the model in real-time, searching for interesting viewpoints while responding to your music.

PW: That shift between hyper-real and abstract imagery pushed me to explore similar transformations in the field recordings. Do you find that these emerging 3D technologies produce their own aesthetic?

MB: Yes. Gaussian splats behave like layered paint in digital form — large shapes gradually refined into smaller details. Because splats vary in size and transparency, the layering resembles painting. I can also deconstruct and rearrange those layers. Any technological image has its own visual language, and I prefer working with that rather than hiding it.

MB: Now my turn. What is the idea behind Phytomorphic Topologies from your perspective?

PW: We wanted to explore new ways of working with natural ecosystems both technically and conceptually, focusing on threatened forests, marshes and peat bogs in Latvia. Like Spillover in Portugal (our previous collaboration), the project documents landscapes under pressure while reflecting on how and why we record sound and images. I have previously worked with field recordings, but not in a purely documentary sense. What changed here was how I approached recording in the environment and later performing with that material.

MB: How important is conveying a specific place in field recording? Is it about universality, memory or transporting listeners somewhere unfamiliar?

PW: How does the listener interpret a space through its sound? It’s difficult to know how listeners mentally reconstruct a place they’ve never visited. Field recordings reduce a complex environment to sound alone, like a dimensional simplification, leaving listeners to fill the missing sensory information from their own experiences. I like that combination of recognizable elements — birds, wind, water — and personal interpretation. My practice isn’t strictly representational. I treat recordings more like samples, transforming them so that traces of their origins remain but become shifted, dreamlike.

Electronic music exists de facto in an artificial space: the studio, tape and software are ‘ideal’ (and unrealistic) blank canvases from which sound is constructed. Because that space is inherently abstract, I prefer branching away from reality rather than imitating it. Still, recordings retain fragments of their origin — pulses and pitches that hint at their source.

We also discussed avoiding a purely extractive relationship to nature. Instead of transforming everything heavily, we sometimes played recordings intact and improvised alongside them. In that sense sound, image and place become three collaborators. We also built tools where visual data generates sonic material, so the landscape itself shapes the sound.

MB: Exactly. That stochastic element, though not truly random, introduces a form of non-human collaboration.

How important is time in your recording process? Do you prefer quick captures or extended observation?

PW: With time-based media I feel compelled to work with the full range of temporal experience — from silence/freezes (no movement) to extremely rapid dynamic changes.

MB: Interesting — static moments feel like elongated time to me.

PW: Perhaps I associate time with movement. In practice I often work quickly because I lack patience, though I do admire recordists who revisit sites repeatedly for detail (Bernie Krause, Joshua Bonnetta). One approach I love is recording at night: fewer human noises and a particular density of sound and silence. In Latvia some of my best recordings happened late in the evening.

MB: That’s interesting because visually I couldn’t capture those moments, though the black ‘outof-bounds’ areas in the images accidentally echo that absence.

Technically, how important is recording equipment? Do you prioritise precision or accept imperfections?

PW: I rarely had access to high-end gear, so I learned to work with affordable tools. For this project I used LOM microphones like the Geofón and Uši Pro pair which sound great without breaking the bank — big fan. Aside from that, I’ve always embraced glitches and errors. Instead of eliminating mistakes, I like to try and see how mistakes might become features, integrated into the work. Trash to treasure, I suppose.

PW: In the studio, perfection for sure. It's harder for me to do so outside. For Phyto I intentionally kept many artefacts — cable noise, footsteps, microphone bumps. Our presence inevitably alters a natural environment (and by extension its soundscape), so pretending recordings represent ‘pure nature’ feels dishonest to me somehow? In any case, I do not have a phonographic / acoustic ecology approach to field recording. I wanted to think of sound here with a cinematic mindset, with ideas of camera pans/zooms, detail or wide angle ‘shots’, but also inspired by films that reveal their own production processes ( Breathless, 8&½, The Last Movie etc.) by leaving in unnatural mistakes, which for me was a way to respond to your desire to look for places where the visual models broke up.

MB: Describe your recording setup and how ideas of scale and simultaneity influence it.

PW: I used multiple microphones simultaneously: a wide omnidirectional pair, a shotgun for closeups, contact mics, hydrophones and a geophone. The goal was to capture environments at different spatial distances so I could later ‘zoom’ between layers of sound by fading between the mic playback. Your photogrammetry models influenced this thinking — turning 2D images into flexible 3D spaces suggested similar possibilities for audio — without going into actual 3D audio, more of an idiosyncratic DIY approach.

MB: That layering feels almost geological — different sonic strata.

PW: Exactly. Later I added tools that translate visual data into sound, including a wave terrain synthesiser driven by pixel information. Image movement directly affects filtering (FFT) and an array of modulation sources for sound modification, creating subtle but dynamic relationships between media.

MB: In performance, how important is a direct one-to-one relationship between sound and image?

PW: Michel Chion’s Audio-Vision has been a big influence on me in terms of sound/image relationship. Sound and image interact in many ways beyond synchronisation — implied offscreen space, symbolic associations and narrative relationships. Direct synchronisation can be effective but is often overused; poetic and conceptual links between media are equally important. If sync is expected, then maybe silence is more compelling? Subverting normalised expectations is a key part of an experimental approach and is something I try my best to keep in mind.

MB: How much are the recordings edited before performance?

PW: I tried to keep them close to their original form to preserve the ability to move between layers in real time. Still, for performance I do some processing using custom Max/MSP tools. Techniques like spectral freezing and granular stretching alter the perception of time, while a macro-granular sampler generates overlapping variations from longer audio segments. These methods retain the sonic identity of the recordings while pushing them toward something more abstract.

Structurally the performance follows (a handful of) the environments we visited, but within each section I improvise — choosing microphones, adjusting processing and reacting to what I hear and see. The goal is not pure documentation but an audiovisual map of threatened ecosystems, gradually intensifying into distorted and chaotic transformations that reflect the environmental pressures those places face.

Bio

Pierce Warnecke is a sound and video artist currently residing in Berlin. He graduated from Berklee College of Music in 2007 and in 2013 completed his Meisterschüler studies (Art and Media) at the Berlin University of the Arts.

Matthew Biederman works across media and milieus, architectures and systems, communities and continents since 1990. He creates works where light, space, and sound reflect on the intricacies of perception. Since 2008 he is a co-founder of Arctic Perspective Initiative, with Marko Peljhan working on projects throughout the circumpolar region.