Concept(ion) 2021

“Just as scientific machines constantly modify our cosmic frontiers, so do the machines of desire and aesthetic creation. As such, they hold an eminent place within assemblages of subjectivation, themselves called to relieve our social machines which are incapable of keeping up with the efflorescence of machinic revolutions that shatter our epoch.”
- Félix Guattari, from Chaosmosis

"Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds." - Robert Oppenheimer quoting the Bhagavad Gita in 1945

Concept(ion) is a video work (GANimation) made with a ML (Machine Learning) algorithm/model, which has been trained on an image set of an electron microscope filming the moment of conception (haploid genomes of the sperm and egg becoming a diploid genome of a new human) and the act of an atom splitting and the beginning of a thermonuclear explosion.
The two images are remarkably similar and as such, create an imagistic fusion highlighting or underlining the parallels between both creation and destruction. As allegory and metaphor, the work operates as a philosophical rumination on the genesis of being itself and its inextricable coupling with its shadow or doppelgänger, death and dissolution.

The audio is composed of ambient sounds and in vitro recordings.