Bianca Shonee Arroyo-Kreimes^CR/QC

Shonee (born Bianca Shonee Arroyo-Kreimes) is a Canadian-Costa Rican digital media artist who sees the potential in video and speculative fiction to depict artificial life. Growing up on the edge of a jungle has fueled her practice, as she now strives to reestablish nature’s place in her life given her current status as an urbanite in Montréal. Her work wields technology as a contrasting metaphor to pin biological and technological life forms against one another, since she perceives our hesitancy to accept emerging technological life as similar to our unconscious desire to separate from the already-present other in our lives: nature. In the virtual worlds she creates, artificial creatures borrow shapes, colours, and stories from the natural world, while remaining singular. This choice is intended to inspire a newly discovered appreciation of the endangered, non-human world we too often take for granted, since her portrayals embody humankind’s seemingly objective but ultimately narrow misunderstanding of the lives of plants and animals.