|
weewerk 09 Thursday 3 April 2003 8-10 pm |
The evening of 3 April, weewerk hosts the project TRANSGENIC<>MORPHOSIS, a speculative installation calling attention to the ethics of technology and its real cost to humanity. It takes the form of a museum of the far future picturing the 20th and 21st centuries. Viewed through stereoscopic viewers and film loops encapsulated within biomechanical pods, the specimens within this multi-media display represent today's technologies gone awry. Collaborators are on this project are Tosca Hidalgo y Terán, Steve Storz, and Andrei Gravelle.
|
|
Biographies Tosca Hidalgo y Terán's mediums include an ibook, a mac G3, metal, electronics, FlashMX and audio. She has been working with metal and computers for over the past 15 years. Striving to integrate the two within her jewellery and sculptural objects, her current work explores this integration through a combination of wire frame constructions, hollow forms, shape memory alloys, silicone, intestine, sound chips, proximity sensors, sonic distortions, and 3D scans. Steve Storz has been producing his technological sculptures for more than 20 years. Much of his work deals with the issues of cast-off devices and materials emanating from places like Silicon Valley. His works have included large scale installations for San Francisco's DNA Lounge, film and performance art companies, electronic and steel sculptures, avant-garde music, the World's Largest Top Hat and a smattering of two dimensional works. Steve has recently re-entered the film world with a short film called Embrace that was shown at the Taos Talking Picture Festival in 2002. Projectionist and audio engineer Andrei Gravelle has produced several bodies of photographic work in the last decade that have explored themes of mortality, mutation and alienation. Recent works have included "Broken Heads," a series of memento mori for the post-modern age and the "Genome Project," a photographic exploration of the moral and ethical crisis born of today's scientific development. |
"The future is already here, it's just unevenly distributed."(1) Science and technology are forcing us into a new era of ethical development as human beings on this planet. The popular press inundates us daily with the hope of someday living forever, self replicating nanotechnologies(2) including but not limited to cloning(3), "non-invasive implants that will allow us to go on-line from the "privacy" of our own brain(4), and GM foods that won't make us fat(5) but might make us smarter.
Notes
|
For
an indication of the confusion we live in, consider the following: we
have been witness to the global race between scientists eager to be
the first to clone a human being and governments eager to pass legislation
forbidding such actions. In the controversy, governments have been swift
to act against cloning which may, arguably, have humanitarian benefits,
whereas the recent development of brain scanning that claims to be able
to identify the brain of actual or potential criminal minds (not unlike
Orwell's "thought crime") is heralded as being a great development in
the war on terrorism and the ethical considerations of such a device
and its application hardly raise an eyebrow.