DERMAPOLIESIS
“Dermapoliesis is a nearby future utopia, an imagined place not linked to technology but instead to organic forms. ”
It is a world with a new flora and fauna that self-produces its own processed materials to meet the needs of the day.
“A number of influences and ideologies have inspired Matteo Cibic’s project, interlacing a multitude of valuable references to arrive at a very personal narrative.The pioneering and obsessive research of naturalist Ernst Haeckel, who described and named a number of ancestral microorganisms.Carl Linnaeus, the founding method of the physicist and zoologist, considered the father of taxonomy. Luigi Serafini, the visionary and artist, who drew and wrote the encyclopedia of an imaginary world in an indecipherable language. All provide a story of possible animal and plant evolutions controlled by the gestures of hypothetical and mysterious artificial intelligences.It is indeed the question of the moment: will the “robotic” intelligences that we have been nurturing for years make us obsolete? Especially now that we have brought them to degrees of consciousness that are in many cases superior to ours. Will there still be a need for us on this planet, which we are persistently filling with artificial intelligences? Will they — along with all the data and information we have fed them — be at our service, or will we be at theirs? Will they embrace the anthropocentric vision that we have defended tooth and nail for centuries, or toss it all away, superseding their “creators”? Certainly, artificial intelligence in the work of Matteo Cibic’s exhibition- experiment looks only minimally at man, aiming instead at the creation of a universe inhabited by not-entirely intelligible figures that do not resemble us. These produced materials are fascinating but not necessarily attributable to a useful human function. The narration develops along several levels: from two-dimensional paper to the digital, from the hybrid three-dimensionality of materials — ceramics, glass, fur, textiles — to the pungent volatility of odours, towards the unlikely “creatures” of the future. Their skeletons are mutations of living forms onto which a new, organically digital story with unpredictable outcomes is grafted.— Valentina Ciuffi, Curator
Gallery - Seeds LondonCurator - Valentina Ciuffi
with the kind support of:
Miles Knitwear and Linealight
”