Becoming Land engages in reconciling the culture - nature divide through a composition process that merges the beauty of natural environments with the horror of overconsumption and environmental degradation. Becoming Land is a work of generative art that produces transforming images of the human body embedded or extended by Nature. A generative collage system composes from a large database of images of people, our actions and Nature.   Meaning, both broad and focused, is drawn out of the work by including, in the compositing process, layers of human portraiture drawn from the beautifully diverse community characteristic of Canada.  The natural images function to reorganize and enhance the body — becoming skins and spaces — making of each a merging of the human and the world we inhabit.  As an experience the work situates itself around the boundary between knowledge, grief, hope and memory. People, their faces and bodies emerge and are torn apart by images of sustainable and un-sustainable human action. Characterization of multiple states of being is expressed as a state in which we at once carry an image of the world within us while, at the same time, are subject to the changes wrought on our selves by the external forces of an enveloping world. In this way Becoming World attempts to show an interpenetration of the human with the world —an interpenetration that might hopefully enter into a discourse on a transpersonal state of being conducive to a rethinking of our place in the world as continuous, cohabitant, participatory and fundamentally resonant with the world.

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