Abstract:
"We are all chimeras, theorised and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism." Donna Haraway, The Cyborg Manifesto, 1997.
"Welcome to the Jellyfish Factory" - a laboratory where the manufacturing of gelatinous sea flesh constitutes a whole new industry of products and dreams for future humans and living others. Here you will discover a visual circus of objects and organisms reflecting and refracting off each other amidst images from the golden sands of the Coromandel's, Wharekaho Beach. The distinctions between machinery, flesh, object and terrain are deliberately blurred in this work, further re-enforcing the breakdown of material and cultural boundaries we are likely to encounter in years to come. Exploring artefacts from the natural world, in contrast to the biology of cells, altered through genetic engineering, has provided the conceptual interface for the digital materiality of my work. I have crafted a cinematic reality using photography and 3D modelling to imagine how genetically modified, reflective, jelly-fish parts might be manufactured in the future. Set within a factory landscape using translucent and globular matter, artificial jellyfish are reproduced within a constructed, reflective ocean. The process of creating a fabricated living artefact has been documented from the initial cloning of polyps through to the production of tentacles and finally the flesh making laboratory. The resulting narrative has led me to consider how the development of cyborg flesh may intersect with the life cycles of other human, android or hybrid machines in the speculative manufacturing of tomorrow.
