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Mia Forrest
Mia Forrest (b. 1987) is an artist based in Australia.
Mia’s work has exhibited at Vellum LA, Cannes AVIFF Art Festival, Channels International Biennial of Video Art at the Australian Center for Moving Image, Queensland Film Festival, and Aesthetica Film Festival. Mia’s Bloom artworks hybridize time, technology, and nature; surreal stretching flowers bloom upward, embodying re-imagined cosmic forms and shapes. As they transform and bloom, they form a DNA-like helix structure, inviting the audience to contemplate how species morph, change, survive, and thrive over time. Artworks from Bloom II have since been licensed by Standard Vision for public art displays and prop tech.
Mia’s work has been recognized by the Photo Collective Australian Photography Awards (finalist 2021) and the Queensland Music Awards Music Video Category (finalist 2016, 2020). Mia's 1/1 NFT’s have been acquired by World of Women, RawDAO + Fellowship Futures and 27 unique NFT collectors.
Which was your first NFT ever?
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The first NFT I ever minted was for my genesis collection, Bloom, in Foundation.
The “Orchidaeace, in motion”. It was collected by Sashaku
Which is the last one?
The most recent NFT minted was a special one off piece created for the NEAL Superrare Space.
It is the “Moth Orchid, in motion”. This was collected by Izgnzlz.eth
How did you start your career in crypto art?
I have been active in the NFT space for just under a year, prior to that I work in commercial and editorial photography. NFT’s have given me the opportunity to explore my creative dreams. In a short time I have had many triumphs––selling out my genesis collection was a major moment for me and having my work collected acquired by World of Women and Raw DAO.
Another pinch-me moment was when my work from BLOOM II was exhibited as part of Vellum LA’s “Artist’s Who Code” exhibition, with a concurrent auction hosted by Artsy.
How can we increase the involvement of women in crypto?
Because the tenets of Web3 are very being built concurrently with cryptocurrency, much like inn trad-fi women are shut out financial systems, or often excluded be it through language, or culture. It is important that DAO’s reserve collection quotas for marginalised groups, including women, so they are visible. It is also important that women are invited to speak at keynotes, events, and their value is advocated for broadly.
Last project?
My last project was an extension of my genesis collection, and it titled Bloom ii – a collection of 13 Australian native flowers.
What are the main guiding principles behind your work? Can you step outside yourself for a moment and let us know what you see?
When I was undertaking my MA in Film, I was very into Gilles Deleuze’s texts on “the time-image” in cinema, which essentially describes cinema’s move away from the “movement-image”. The “movement-image” was dominated by three-act narrative structures and the montage of action, whereas the “time-image” showcased time and its direct representation in film, which made way for more abstract and experimental cinema.
For example, Chantal Akerman’s “Jeanne Dielman[…]”. I digress, but it’s important for me to mention how the representation of time in cinema influenced my thoughts around time and the representation of it. Without his texts, I wouldn’t have had the motivation to think about time as such a rich concept.
Do you get any particular source of inspiration for the visual styles of your works e.g. Do they arrive in relation to the place (physical, psychological, or situational) you were located at the time?
You can find me at night watching timelapses of flowers, studying their natural form and possibilities. I’ve been learning about Ikebana and flower arrangement to better inform my aesthetic, so I can consider shape and movement and space in the way the flowers are situated.
Can you dive a bit into the technical aspects of the works? Software or hardware used. (in the wide sense; it could be thoughts and bodies), as well as the editing process?
The process of making the Bloom collections are rooted in mathematical processes to render a surreal image. Slit-scan photography emerged as an mechanical, photographic technique that was created by removing the camera shutter and physically pulling a strip of film through a custom made a slit in the gate, constantly exposing light through that slit as it moved. The results vary depending on your subject, but essentially it enables you to stretch moving subjects across the time plane in an image – so it is a spatial technique. As technology matured, this process is possible to achieve through generative script in post-production and a lot of experimentation. The workflow varies across different programmes, and my way of doing it is very manual and labour intensive. Essentially, I film the fleurs and then take that footage and process it through a generative script in After Effects. For the slit-scan stretching to occur fluidly, I experiment with the scripting parameters and manually implement time remapping. I’ve made a tweet thread about my process here:
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I require a high framerate camera (at least 100fps). I used a RED for the genesis Bloom Collection, and a Blackmagic 6k for BLOOM II. I preferred using Blackmagic as the texture seemed smoother, and the grade was creamier. The software I use is Adobe After Effects. I’m now looking into other software, such as Touch Designer and timelapse technology, to broaden my toolset.
What are some of the particular challenges you and your team have faced in realizing the works?
Rendering this out as a video would have literally taken thousands of hours, so I had to figure out a workaround for the extensive rendering. To do this, I had to implement some lateral thinking and apply some maths and approach the creation of this in a different way, mixing still images and time-remapping. I almost gave up because maths isn’t my forte, but I finally “cracked the code” and have a clean workflow and practice, which enables me to create these blooming fleurs. Might I add, this laborious and intense workflow is probably the reason why there isn’t much of this work out there?
Additionally, flowers can be quite unpredictable, so that is always a challenge.
Can you tell us about the relationship you want or aim to have with the viewer?
At the end of the day, as the fleurs transform and morph, I hope the audience contemplates how these species morph, change, survive, and thrive over time.