Mediamatic Magazine vol 4 #1+2 Louis Bec 1 Oca 1989

Chimérique Teratologie permuteert Déjà-Vues

From Prothesis to endothesis

The transforming potential of the technical sciences undermines a large number of the most accepted concepts and practices.

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Chimérique Teratotolie -

Hence new genetics technologies have opened up a field of research for the various assemblage techniques and some particular aspects are being explored for the very first time.

The principle of adding or multiplying (which has radically defined technical thinking and the construction of objects and models from time immemorial) has gradually gained an epistemological, aesthetic and technical status.

In schematic terms this signifies a shift away from an accommodation of the eye and towards a functional autonomous integration, away from the Archimboldo effect and towards the geneticists’ xenoplastic freaks.

What once were nothing more than monstrous chimeric assemblages, chance or decorative connections, tacked-together technical and industrial constructions have become an ‘organic’ compound, a ‘hvpostructure’ which reveals an assemblage’s underlying continuum, a subterranean region where as yet unheard of conjunctions occur.

These ‘endotheses’ differ completely from the artificial organs of the protheses. They are the new forms of conjunction.

The assemblage modeler no longer works mechanically on the phenomenon’s exterior, rather he introduces mutagenous elements during the process that allow the pre-programmed object to emerge in successive stages.

An associative and oneiric imagination is sacrificed in favour of process-based thinking which is dominated by a morphogenetic, programmatic and numerical evolution.

The product modelled according to this way of thinking is a evolutive chimerization where all the constituent phases take place under variable conditions and with an indivisible unit as the final result.

Here we encounter chimaera and chimerization. That is to say: objects that grow out of or are the result of at least two entities which are provided in the textural, functional and formal elements of the conjunction.

Genetics, embryology and teratology prompt these permutations. Informatics in turn engender metamorphic productions by means of algorithms and automatic transfer.

The animal systematician involved in the border zones of epistemology and art is aware not simply of being confronted with this situation, in some respects he actually seeks it out and emphasizes it. The new relations between the natural sciences, the fine arts and technology require different approaches, methods and practices in order that their application may focus on the various ways of 'sticking things together'.

By developing parallel or complementary animal systematics, he chimerizes elements from direct or rational thought onto elements from the indirect or symbolic.

By creating a systematic zoology and organisms called Upokrinomenes. he implants an expansive zoology, a zoology of change, a ‘hvpophanic’ zoology in the heart of 'scientific' zoology: the creation of potential animals that cunningly examines the semantic gaps in the representation of life.

By creating similar fancies and the chimerization of zoo-systematic models, the animal systematician develops a ‘hypocritical methodology’, the one stratagem by which he can get a grip on the fluctuating, the multiformed and the variable.

The photographic documentation shows computer-generated Upokrinomenes. This method of producing technomorphogeneses also enables the production of artifacts, to result in a taxonomy of promiscuity and the tenebrous.

translation Annie Wright