My Name is Sculpture

Abstract

Metabolic sculptures explore the transformative and generative processes of matter and life. They enable art to enter reality, to link artworks with processes in nature and society and to create visions of possible futures and relationships between our bodies and technology.

Data streams, biological organisms, methods from the sciences and "real" processes are increasingly becoming the material of art. How do the new correspondences between art and science, fact and fiction, construct themselves in contemporary art production? Which conceptual and narrative aesthetics and poetics result from this?

By taking the PROMETHEUS DELIVERED project as an example, the artistic method of conceptual narration will be presented, which combines pictorial, literary and molecular ways of speaking and acting. PROMETHEUS DELIVERED performs a story that oscillates between science fiction and horror, utopia and dystopia. The project connects sculptures, drawings and literature with biochemical processes in which, for example, human liver cells are cultivated, fermented and distilled into alcohol.

The liver cells refer to the ancient tradition of hepatoscopy. The organ that was once deemed the seat of life becomes the vital point of departure to read humanity’s future in the context of a cellular economy. In POMETHEUS DELIVERED, cannibalism becomes autophagy, which is not derived from amorality or dark evil, but from the principle of autotropic resource use.

Microperformativity as the inclusion of metabolic processes of the living creates a new realism of art. Digital algorithms and biochemical processes turn works of art into autopoietic systems that preserve themselves, change themselves and process reality. Artistic objects are transformed into subjects and agents, into actors acting on different levels: semiotic and molecular, virtual and material. Thus artistic works that were formerly described as pictures and sculptures no longer insist in a unmutable state, but become the starting point for changes that can be described with transformation, transmutation, variability or as processual. Performers are not only of human nature, but artistic objects become agents performing real processes.

Notes

1 Zoē means life in Greek, more precisely ‘the simple fact of life, which is common to all living things’. Aristotle, in his Nicomachean Ethics, distinguishes between bios and zoē. In Homo sacer (1998), Giorgio Agamben sums up this distinction by describing zoē as the creaturely life and bios as the life encoded by social rules. Bios determines the political, and zoe the biological body.

2 The French chemist Jean-Marie Lehn develops an analogy between molecules and words in his supra-molecular chemistry: ‘Like the artist, the chemist engraves into matter the products of creative imagination. The stone, the sounds, the words do not contain the works that the sculptor, the composer, the writer express from them. Similarly, the chemist creates original molecules, new materials and novel properties from the elements provided by nature, indeed entire new worlds, that did not exist before they were shaped at the hands of the chemist, like matter is shaped by the hand of the artist’ (Lehn 1995: 206). A formal analysis confirms Lehn’s analogy of chemistry and language; for example, in that English language patterns and the structural motives of organic molecules follow the same statistics. Computational linguistics methods can thus be applied to organic molecules to identify characteristic patterns; see Cadeddu et al. (2014).

3 While Alfred Jarry’s concept of pataphysics sought to unite mechanics and eroticism through imaginary machines and apparatuses, and to replace natural reproduction, PSYCHOPROSA uses methods of chemistry synthetically rather than metaphorically. The marriage as a chemical compound and reaction takes place with ironic allusion to Marcel Duchamp’s ‘large glasses’ that allow the imaginary to condense molecularly.