Gina Czarnecki - Silvers Alter
This is a stage for artificial evolution where human ‘control models’ and their created offspring are the subjects for the audience to manipulate and mate. The ‘beings’ that the viewer creates have never existed before – the process of selection generates creatures and sounds with their own individual resonance. The audience exerts selective choice to shape the flow of random mutation and therefore directs the evolutionary course. The audience create the ‘artworks’ in a real–time experience.
The installation takes the form of a large scale back-projection on which human forms ‘live’. These figures are changed by the audience’s presence and movement within the space. Interactivity is very physical. It encourages a social, physical and verbal interaction between people before the interaction with technology.
The project is an experimental observation of the development of consciousness and science. It is not a fictive game with still unexamined possibilities of genetics and it does not aim to popularise scientific discoveries. It raises many questions: To what extent are we prepared to participate in all that we have made possible and that we aspire to make possible for ourselves? How do we make decisions about who to propagate and who to terminate? When does data become information become knowledge?
It gives the audience the power to create, eliminate and stare, to immortalize their created offspring in data image banks and DNA profiles. Generations are displayed in the growing archive of screen-grab print pinned around the space – a record of the changing population over time – and different populations will emerge from different locations, countries, nations. Decisions and their effect 10 generations, 100 generations later can be seen – like evolution in fast forward.
3 Apr 04 – 6 Jun 04 | Stills Gallery, Edinburgh, UK
Produced by Forma
