Hunter and Dog

Frederik De Wilde

FILE SÃO PAULO 2025: SYNTHETIKA – Art and Technology – Installations
Electronic Language International Festival

Hunter and Dog – Belgium

Genetic and evolutionary algorithms reinterpret an existing artwork. De Wilde uses digital scans and custom genetic and evolutionary algorithms as a deconstruction technique to reinterpret and update the nineteenth-century work Hunter and Dog from sculptor John Gibson R. A. (1790–1866).

Frederik De Wilde’s Hunter and Dog interrogates the intersections of human evolution, genetic engineering, and the hybridization of technology and biology. De Wilde reinterprets the historical sculpture through the lens of post-evolutionary theory, engaging with contemporary debates on CRISPR, synthetic biology, and the implications of human-directed genetic modification. CRISPR, the revolutionary gene-editing technology, has introduced an unprecedented rupture in the trajectory of evolution. No longer constrained by the slow mechanisms of natural selection, humans now possess the ability to intervene directly in their own genetic blueprint, marking a shift toward a post-Darwinian paradigm. This technological power, however, is not neutral; it emerges from a historical lineage of scientific inquiry deeply entangled with colonialism. The history of genetic manipulation is inseparable from colonial bioprospecting, eugenics, and exploitative medical experimentation on marginalized populations. Colonial regimes treated bodies—both human and non-human—as sites of intervention, control, and optimization, a logic that persists in contemporary biotechnological frameworks. Post-colonial discourse reveals how genetic engineering risks perpetuating these legacies, reinforcing power asymmetries between those who wield biotechnological control and those subjected to its consequences. CRISPR, while offering the promise of eradicating disease and expanding human potential, also raises ethical concerns about genetic stratification, bio-capitalism, and the commodification of life itself. De Wilde’s work visualizes these tensions, making visible the processes of cell division and morphogenesis—the very biological mechanisms now subject to human intervention. Hunter and Dog does not merely depict the transformation of a neoclassical form but speculates on the future of the human body as a site of engineered evolution. From a decolonial perspective, the artwork questions who has the authority to edit life and to what ends. It challenges the techno-utopian narratives that frame genetic modification as an inevitable progress while obscuring its social, ethical, and ecological implications. By hybridizing art, science, and technology, Hunter and Dog compels us to confront the uncertainties of a CRISPR-driven future: Will genetic editing reinforce existing inequalities, or can it be decolonized and democratized? How do we navigate this post-natural frontier without losing the human—and more-than-human—dimensions of our existence? De Wilde’s work invites us into this speculative space, where the hunter, the dog, and the algorithm coalesce into a vision of a world where biology is no longer destiny, but a site of contested agency.

Where are we going from here? 

BIO

Frederik De Wilde fuses art, science, and tech. Known for his Blackest-Black works that inspired Kapoor’s Vantablack, he has shown at Venice Biennale, BOZAR, MAAT, Pompidou, and ZKM, winning awards like Ars Electronica.

TH-42PH10EK x 5
Five screens were installed by the artist as pendulums that swing continuously. As soon as all five have come to a standstill, they are pulled back into their original positions with the help of cable winches and are made to swing again – triggered by pulling a rip cord, a performative act that cannot take place without human intervention and which involves the exhibition supervisor in the installation. Each cycle, which lasts approximately 45 minutes, ends as soon as all five screens have come to a standstill and no more sound is produced by their movement. The sound is produced by the amplification of the friction to which the joints of the moving pendulum are subjected. Multiplication thus creates five oscillating loops that merge into one another with a time offset.

Resonance
Resonance is an interactive audio-visual experience that encourages people to engage in a dialogue with water, whilst creating an intimate atmosphere of contemplation. The installation comes fully to life when people interact with it. We used sound and color to immerse the museum visitors and invite them to explore the role that technology and human intervention might play in harmonizing our environment.

Кима Холтерманда
קים הולטרמן
Church of the Holy Cross
Kim Høltermand navigates his world as if he’s the last man on Earth. He records built environments, simplifying the buildings and structures that interest him down to their simplest geometric elements. Wrapped in an atmospheric stillness, he removes all signs of passing from his subjects and hints at human intervention without ever allowing us to witness interaction. He leaves only symmetry and form.

Vanitas Machine

The installation VANITAS MACHINE addresses the desire for eternal life and the potential of life-prolonging measures. Based on a candle which – by means of technical intervention – burns down very slowly, vanitas machine creates a contemporary analogy to the endeavour of prolonging the human lifespan with the help of science and technology.Being one of the classical vanitas symbols, a burning candle recalls the futility of the moment, the transience of human life and the certainty of the end of all existence. But is this end really still inevitable?In the course of the last two centuries, average human life expectancy has increased significantly in the industrialised countries. Moreover, in the context of scientific research the biological causes of ageing are being explored. Numerous theories of aging have already been developed pointing both towards physiological as well as environmental factors.One of the first theories of ageing was the so-called »metabolism theory«, which claims that the lifespan of organisms is reciprocally related to energy turnover and therefore connected to calorie intake, oxygen consumption and heart rate: The higher the metabolic rate, the shorter the lifespan of the organism.

Swamp Radio
Swamp Radio gets beyond our anthropocenic reality, and maintains connections between the humans and other species. By artistic interventions and transmitting interfaces, the Swamp Radio is turned into a social media megaphone for invisible and inaudible actors of nature. The artists are installing microbial fuel cells, environmental monitoring sensors and transmitting devices to transform the swamps into dynamic power plants and the 21st century multi-voiced broadcast media.

Absent Engagement
Alexandra Zierle (DE) and Paul Carter’s (UK) collaborative work is interdisciplinary, multi-sensory and often site/context responsive, spanning performance, happenings and interventions, sound, video and installation. Through their collaborative practice, Zierle & Carter critically examine different modes of communication and what it means to be human, addressing notions of belonging, dynamics within relationships, and the transformation of limitations. Their work sites an embodied investigation into human interactions and encounters, acting as an invitation to venture into the spaces in-between the external and internal, permanent and transient, spoken and unheard. The work fundamentally explores society’s conventions, traditions, and rituals, often flipping them on their head, reversing orders, and disrupting the norm.

Forced Landscape
Rachael Champion’s site-specific sculptures and installations are engaged in a discourse surrounding the dependant yet unclear relationship between industry, technology and nature. Her works consist of large scale constructions and dramatic architectural interventions that question the shifting interactions humanity has with the natural world and considers their boundaries, separations and progressive implications. Through manipulating information from diverse influences that include brutalist architecture, agriculture, raw materials, municipal infrastructure, public space and ecology, Champion questions the layered and dynamic complexities of our shifting physical environment.

Ways of Water – A Love Potion for Nature
Alexandra Zierle and Paul Carter’s collaborative work is interdisciplinary, multi-sensory and site and context responsive spanning performance, happenings, interventions, sound, video and installation. Through their practice, Zierle & Carter critically examine different modes of communication and what it means to be human both as individuals and as a ‘collective entity’. Their work addresses notions of belonging, cultural identity, the dynamics within relationships, harmony through conflict and the transformation of limitations.

Primary Producers
Rachael Champion’s site-specific sculptures and installations are engaged in a discourse surrounding the dependant yet unclear relationship between industry, technology and nature. Her works consist of large scale constructions and dramatic architectural interventions that question the shifting interactions humanity has with the natural world and considers their boundaries, separations and progressive implications.

Имме Ван Дер Хаак
Beyond the Body

“My work focuses on altering the human form by affecting its figure with just one simple intervention. Photos of the human body are printed onto translucent silk which will create the possibility of physically layering different bodies, ages, generations and identities. In a dance performance, the moving body manipulates the fabric so the body and the silk become one, distorting our perception or revealing a completely new physical form. The movement then brings this to life.”

MENSKE

Even the standing room only tickets have sold out, and the raging mass of disappointed kids looks like they may start a riot: the atmosphere before Ultima Vez’s performance is akin to a rock concert. Choreographer superstar Wim Vandekeybus’s company has toured the world with their trademark vocabulary of acrobatic, extreme, often violent movement, soaked in multimedia and energetic music. Menske (meaning approximately ‘little human’), their latest work, has all the typical flaws and qualities of classic Vandekeybus. On the conservative end of political intervention, Menske is an explosive concoction of brash statements about the state of the world today, a sequence of rapidly revolving scenes of conflicting logic: intimist, blockbuster, desperate, hysterical. The broad impression is not so much of a sociological portrait, but of a very personal anguish being exorcised right in front of us, as if Vandekeybus is constantly switching format in search of eloquence. Visually, it is stunning, filmic: a slum society falling apart through guerrilla warfare, in which girls handily assume the role of living, moving weapons. A woman descends into madness in an oneiric hospital, led by a costumed and masked group sharpening knives in rhythmic unison. A traumatised figure wanders the city ruins dictating a lamenting letter to invisible ‘Pablo.’ Men hoist a woman on a pole her whole body flapping like a flag. “It’s too much!” intrudes a stage hand, “Too much smoke, too much noise, too much everything!” And the scene responsively changes to a quiet soliloquy. At which point, however, does pure mimesis become complicit with the physical and psychological violence it strives to condemn? Unable to find its way out of visual shock, Menske never resolves into anything more than a loud admission of powerlessness.