oh, what grand megastructures shining beacons of modernity fade swiftly into naivety, they were never meant to exist to begin with, their ruins will never crumble under the dying sun, only paperclipped documents and dusty binders contain collective delusion, consider instead: software serfdom antivirus wheat field accelerated vassalage, content is generated from the past as the future empties out

MATHIAS WESTBROOK


Filling A Vessel With Primordial Soup

2022
Video, 3 min. 41 sec.

Originally made for the duo-show: A Timeline Made Flesh

The origin of all earthly life is said to arise in a sea of blood red primordial ooze. Aeons upon aeons later, this soup takes form in the shape of a modern human being. The human being becomes sufficiently advanced enough to replicate its chemical origins in a controlled machine-made environment: the Miller-Urey experiment. This introduced a circular narrative to the history of life itself. The biological creation was but a microscopic entity, a being of fluids and gases.

Simultaneously, humans created artificial brains capable of calculations beyond that of themselves, their bodies of hardened metals and electrical currents. What if these machines were to create an experiment of their own, recreating their own creator? Would the assembly of this homunculus become an accurate representation? Or would the machine logic simply produce an abstract approximation?