In 1886, Villier de L'Isle
Adam, a French pre-symbolist, wrote L'Eve Future, a fictional fantasy
about Thomas Edison building "a cybernetic organism, chimera
and mythic hybrid of a machine and human being." RE-constructing
EVE is a "blue print," an "assemblage" of symbolic
materials, interactions, and historical anatomies of possible bodies.
Bodies, as in Villier's
work, are conceived as partial identities, as works-in-part as well
as whole. The morphology is an animated dynamo organized on an imagined
network of metonymic figures, integrated muscles, prosthetic bones,
and biotic circuits. The inside and outside substance is a juxtaposition
of synthetic models and found recycled digital materials, created
or downloaded, stored, manipulated, and rearranged in a mesh of
difference / sex / woman / man / machine / history / order / poem.
A topographic evocation
of genetic engineering, the work is ultimately transitional, an
invitation to explore the "multiplicity" and the complex
relationship between organism and machine.
|