The enmeshment of stories and theories in time and space about the future of human
techno-biological body is the starting point of project 3047 - a dark room body.
The facts and fictions of present discourses continue to construct false problems of possible
lived imaginary beings and the conditions of development of their environments.
3047 intends to explore and critique some of the determinist dichotomies that had prevailed
in the research of artificial life and artificial intelligence developments and perception of what
future life forms should look like: the organic versus the artificial, the virtual against the real;
the theories of natural evolution confronted with culture’s technological developments in
biotechnologies and technoscience. More specifically the project focuses its critique on the
efforts to erase embodiment within artificial life discourses and the accent on autonomous
agency. The artificial life debates raise a well-known problem on corporeality as the remains
of something technology wants to substitute or displace.
3047 is an interactive video-installation performed between a fictional avatar and its
“original” model. Video-performance as a creative practice, introduce into an installation
environment, reflects on the concept of performativity as a way to acquired knowledge not
from mere representation but through lived experience.
----
Since the beginning of the explorations of possible life extensions, most researchers and
authors are focused on the replacement of the “obsolete” human body for an “advanced
non-biological carrier with the promise of archiving “cybernetic immortality”. The figure of the “Avatar” rises as a post-human figure, a post gender creature that responds to an amalgam of robotics, artificial intelligence, and downloaded conciseness.As usually observed in media and science fiction the avatar image is more likely to be represented as a stereotypical female form; in response to this, the project initiates the
narrative by the appropriation of this stereotype, integrating concepts of simbio-Genesis and
genetic mutation, in the making of an- ‘other’ not necessary human organism. The
‘humanimal’ avatar figure raises the question of human-nature relationships in the
evolutionary history of the biological and lived body; this fleshy body that relates to the
nature-culture interface where all living and non-living creatures co-evolve.
Based on Donnas Haraway’s work on kinship and speculative fiction, the narrative of the
project aims to offer passage points through which we encounter the heterogeneous
discourses and lustful bodies of fiction that challenge the agency in which the questions of
human, posthuman seem to be proposed. Placing a great emphasis in the rejection of both
constructionism and essentialism and divisions between nature and culture, what’s right or
wrong, the formulation of the audio narrative is based on partial truths and speculative
fiction, an in-between ground for different way of thinking without having the necessity of
taking sides. As Haraway states, the “stories that tell stories” are not restricted with-in the
people, organisms and or entities they tell or are told by, but they exist mutually
contaminated by fields of biotechnology, computer science, cyberfeminism and science
studies.
The concept of “risk” presented by Sarah Kember offers an alternative to the exceeding
boundaries of prediction and calculation manifested in the futurist narratives of the life “as it
should be”; where biotechnologies could incorporate from cyberfeminism both imagination
and complexity. By imagining possible futures, near-future fiction has the capacity to seize
on the science and technology currently researched in laboratory environments and take it
just far enough that it can provoke audiences to think on impending potential implications for
society (Virtual Futures, 2017).
At the end of the piece, a development of “digital aesthetics” occurs in the form the code
“Game Of Life” as it activates with the proximity of the performer and manifests itself as a
moment of disconnection, fragmentation but at the same time evolving into new “forms of
life”. The Game of Life, also known simply as Life, is a cellular automaton devised by the
British mathematician John Horton Conway in 1970. The code provides an example
of emergence and self-organization meaning that its evolution is determined by its initial
state, requiring no further input. A cellular automaton can simulate a variety of real-world
systems, including biological and chemical ones. Inside the long tradition of computer
science incorporating biological principals, cyberfeminism might bring into focus the
question of the agency offering a more extensive perspective for the discussion of identity,
belonging and being in the posthumanist frame of work.
