…grasping with the entanglement of all matters…
Fieldnotes from a Technobiocology (2019/2020) is a series of sculptures that imagine how humans may influence how organisms and ecosystems evolve in the distant future through the blending of biology and technology. Inadvertently, new life forms may be born at the intersection of nourishing soil and electrical waste and new hybrids may emerge to sequester excess carbon from the air. The ‘debris’ of DNA editing experiments or digital organisms may come to co-evolve creating new symbiotic living beings.
This MA Art and Science degree show project won the TENSION gallery prize and was featured in Wired co-founder Jane Metcalfe’s book Neo-Life and in The Earth Issue.
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Fieldnotes #1 Exhibition Booklet
Fieldnotes #2 Exhibition Booklet
_Digimacule - foam, bioplastic, chia seeds, pigment, digital animation on screen: In the future, will ‘digital’ life forms exist? Digimacule represents a series of digital, purely-coded life forms that have taken refuge in a tactile, bioplastic shell or ‘hardware’ body. This is akin to how a single-celled amoeba inhabits a dead sponge skeleton or a hermit crab resourcefully finds its shell in order to complete their form. Does the coded creature need a physical scaffold in order to ‘exist’? Is it a legitimate life form or just a simulation of it?
_Abiogenesite - foam, caulk, wire, sand, human hair, latex, pigment
_Abiogenesite - foam, plaster, pigment, wire: Abiogenesis is the process where the inanimate becomes animate! The Abiogenesites are a suite of creatures who have emerged in-situ from the material of their inanimate surrounding environment - in this case physical pollutants like e-waste and coloured plastic. Their evolution is glacial and this is referenced by their forms that appear to be creeping or emerging from the detritus. In one, e-waste has fossilized and formed the scaley, protective shield, in another plastic has emulsified into an dazzling skin, in another an organism is disembodied with organs functioning and connecting outside of the body.
_Chrystaphillium - egg shell, dough, silicone, pigment
_Hybraphile- foam, alginate, LCD ink, LED wire, wire mesh. In the last clean breath of an aggressive wasteland, earth baking in chemitoxicity - life finds form. Clusters of creaturely comrades find symbiosis, dividing survival into one unified operation, battling against extremes. A deconstructed organism finds strength in numbers sharing super-survival capacities turning ‘threat’ into ‘function’. Extreme heat awakens chromosynthesis. Liquid radiation is subverted into veins. Aggressive wiring becomes shielding.
_Biopunk - 3D printed plaster - New species appear to materialise from cross-kingdom DNA - hybrid morphologies are both faintly familiar and wildly ‘other’. Embryonically bleached - the specimens hint at fresh forms-in-progress but are they artefacts of the lab or offspring of some wild/cultured procreation? Are these wondrous expressions of human creativity or mutant monstrosities? Each nascent biology exudes hidden capacities, unknown and untapped adaptations.