highlike

NOPER & SAINT MACHINE

FEED ME
FEED ME is a ludic experiment that explores the relation between the artwork and its public. With a self-ironical approach, the project is calling the subjects of monstrous and perpetually insatiable Tra to her feeding ritual: the entire exhibition is a live organism that feeds on the energy produced by the movements of the public. It is an interactive multimedia capsule that carries a dynamic platform where everything moves, pulses and reacts to motion on a common rhythm. The exhibition space is structured in narrowing concentric circles, creating several worlds that include each other and cocoon around a magical protection space, thus the public is activated on several levels.

NICK ERVINCK

Olnetop
OLNETOP has something monstrous, a hybrid shape in which one can recognize various elements. The work is not clearly defined but points in different directions. The imagery used is clearly inspired by macro photographic images of splashing water, and thus sculpturally interprets the encounter between nature and technology.

Rebecca Warren

She works with an eye to extremes – monstrous excess, alarming paucity – creating a variety of objects that exist somewhere on the continuum between pure fleshiness and pure cartoonishness. Warren’s heightened appreciation of the framing, placement and context of her works, combined with an exploration of materials’ hidden meanings can also be found in her wall-mounted vitrines.

STELARC

drawing with robot arm
“With gene mapping, gender reassignment, prosthetic limbs and neural implants, what a body is and how a body operates becomes problematic. We generate Fractal Flesh and Phantom Flesh, extended operational systems and virtual task environments. Meat and metal mesh into unexpected and alternate anatomical architectures that perform remotely beyond the boundaries of the skin and beyond the local space it inhabits. The monstrous is no longer the alien other. We inhabit an age of Circulating Flesh. Organs are extracted from one body and inserted into other bodies. Limbs that are amputated from a dead body can be reattached and reanimated on a living body. A face from a donor stitched to the skull of the recipient becomes a Third Face. A skin cell from an impotent male can be recoded into a sperm cell. And more interestingly a skin cell from a female body might be recoded into a sperm cell. Turbine hearts circulate blood without pulsing. In the near future you might rest you head on your loved one’s chest. They are warm to the touch, they are breathing, they are certainly alive. But they will have no heartbeat. A cadaver can be preserved forever through plastination whilst simultaneously a comatose body can be sustained indefinitely on a life-support system. Dead bodies need not decompose, near-dead bodies need not die. Most people will no longer die biological deaths. They will die when their life-support systems are switched off. The dead, the near-dead, the not-yet-born and the partially living exist simultaneously. And cryongenically preserved bodies await reanimation at some imagined future. We live in an age of the Cadaver, the Comatose and the Chimera. Liminal spaces proliferate. Engineering organs, stem-cell growing them or by bio-printing will result in an abundence of organs. An excess of organs. Of organs awaiting bodies. Of Organs Without Bodies.” STELARC