2018
video projection, participatory workshop, petri dishes, microorganisms

Looking closely at our bodies, I am fascinated by the fact that the human body contains ten times as many non-human microbial cells as human ones. Exploring through a microscopic lens, one can discover an ecosystem full of trans-species entanglements. I focus on the body as a fluctuating domain for fragmented entities rather than a singular, wholesome entity.

I collect people’s debris by transplanting microorganisms from their bodies. This diaspora forms new bionomic environments within petri dishes and the tangible sentiment is transferred as images. I construct a simulated world where the microbes are digitally generated and interact with each other within the virtual physiology, by utilizing 3D graphics software. Instead of joints and muscles: vertexes, edges, and faces are moved, rotated, and scaled. Digital cells and microorganisms collide, bounce, and go through each other; they merge, subtract from, and reflect each other. This synthetic ecosystem is then expressed through animation, performative video and interactive installation, which is juxtaposed with its original source.

Fragments of bodies evolve from marginal presence to magnified images, to augmented 3D forms and then back to tangible reality; a hybrid of synthetic and natural, of the virtual and the real. Audiences are invited to be fully immersed in this pluralistic and unpredictable disorder where innumerable variables are created and structure is continually created, transformed, and de-territorialized. This heterogeneous body dissects socially constructed categories of our bodies such as skin color, sex, or obesity index, which previously determined individual identities. The body continuously iterates being disembodied, fragmented, interstitial, transitional, and emergent.