Description (en)
The research “Chimera: the Animal, the Machine, and the Almost Human” explores the ontological instability of human bodies and the mutable nature of our experience. Representing a dynamic convergence of artistic and scientific inquiry, it questions how culture and technology have altered our understanding of being human across different temporal landscapes. Specifically, the investigation delves into the enduring concept of Chimera, a creature central to my enquiry. Springing from Greek mythology as a monstrous entity with a triple body – a fusion of goat, lion, and snake – the term ‘Chimera’ has evolved to describe hybrids of various creatures, and experimental biotechnological organisms with distinct genetic material or ‘cell lines’. Embracing the flexibility of the term itself, the Chimera in my artistic practice symbolizes a fusion of entities and practices, born from the amalgamation of machine, animal, and human, as well as the blend of artistic, scientific, and cultural endeavors I have engaged in. It stands as a dynamic, malleable, augmented and continuously cultivated novel being, continually evolving through the practices of technology (medical and scientific) and literature (fictional and academic). The research interweaves stories of scientific advance in robotics, prosthetics, gene splicing, and stem-cell implantations with the imaginative realms of mythology, history, art, and literature. In conjunction with my artistic practice, which creates Chimera entities by altering and extending the body through non-anthropomor- phic artifacts or ‘chimeric embodiments’, the study explores diverse scenarios of possibilities, consequences, and experiences of mental and somatic boundaries and mutations. It particularly investigates the role of animal–human imaginings as a catalyst for reconfiguring discourses around technological advancement and as a possible driver for redesigning socio-political entities that can explore and imagine futures. Through a dialog between historical and contemporary practices of hybridity and human augmentation, including my own Chimera artworks spanning the last 13 years, this research probes corporeal possibilities and transcendent technological experiences that may have the potential to forge alternative ingenuities, identities, ideologies, and ways of perceiving our world.