Chimera

Design Academy Eindhoven
2024

Chimera exoplores a fictionnal world, or a near future where transhumanism is a really develloped practice
metal object, tubes, pumps, clay, silicone, AI modified pictures

The time line of our life, the only that is going to happen to all of us, death, is not happening anymore.

In this disturbed time-line, this installation shows the remains of our lives, and how these people from the photo album could look like now.

Do we recognize ourseleves in this creature ?
What it means to be human, is perhaps not to remain human at all.

How do we define human existence that does not begin with birth nor ends in death ?

According to Greek mythology, the Chimera, Chimaera, Chimæra, or Khimaira was a monstrous fire-breathing hybrid creature from Lycia, Asia Minor, composed of different animal parts.

The term «chimera» has come to describe any mythical or fictional creature with parts taken from various animals, to describe anything com- posed of disparate parts or perceived as wildly imaginative, implausible, or dazzling. In other words, a chimera can be any hybrid creature.

With my experiments on what an hybrid between human and a mechanical being could look like, I started to wonder what could we look like if these transhumanists thoughts were pushed, for us totally biological being, to the extreme.

The key is to replace a biological evolution controlled by the «blind watchmaker» - as evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins puts it - with a programmed evolution of humanity driven by science and technology.

If we follow Richard Dawkins’s thoughts on evolution, these being would be now controlled by a clairvoyant watchmaker.

This being would be composed by meat, metal and code.
It would be sustained in the real world, but would really ‘live’ in a virtual sub reality forever with his peers.

Composition of the Chimera : metal skeleton, clay skin, silicone coating

To talk about this disturbed time-line, I decided to work on old photos, the firsts dating from the 1800s.
I then modified them using artificial intelligence.
For me, this process is also a study of what transhumanism might look like, but imagined by technology itself.

It’s also a sort of mise en abime, on what does technology looks like according to technology.

In 2011, the twin turbin heart was implanted into the chest of a terminally ill patient. He lived long enough to fully test this smaller, more robust artificial heart. Interestingly it circulates the blood continuously without pulsing. So, in the near future you might rest you head on your loved ones chest. They are warm to the touch, they are sighing, they are speaking, they are certainly alive – but they have no heartbeat.

Synthetic blood is tested on animals as we speak. If we decided to use it on humains, in your coffin we would find your decomposing body and a completely intact pool of blood, on which time has no effect.

We don’t really realise, but we are now slowly transforming into this Chimera.