Lost Heritage

Lost Heritage explores the relationship between materiality, technology, synthetic biology and nature. How technology transforms and shapes our physical reality, including the human body? Synthetic biology aims at creating new forms of life from scratch combining programming, design and biological bodies, thus making life a form of design rather than evolution. In a way, synthetic biology materializes the philosopher’s Ray Brassier’s ideas around Prometheanism, where he questions the dogmatic understanding of the “natural” equilibrium between what is given (e.g. death, disease) and what is man-made. He calls this acceptance of the notion of equilibrium irrational and provokes us to reconsider the notion. Thus, Lost Heritage opens a field to imagine what forms this destruction of equilibrium could take—or how far it can be pushed.

While thinking about the artificial (and rapidly dissolving) boundaries between natural and artificial, we stumbled upon (then) new scientific field of synthetic biology, as well as recent philosophical ideas about Prometheanism. We tried to gather as much information as possible about the curious and sometimes controversial field of synthetic biology to see how their experiments in creating artificial or synthetic forms of life correspond to the current theoretical inquiries and the environmental situation in general, where human impact on the environment has penetrated all possible levels. Later on, we attempted to synthesize the material gathered and our own thoughts, translating that into visual and material form, thus the importance of the specific selection of materials in this project.  Here we combined organic materials, such as grass and liquid with artificial ones, such as resin, silicone, synthetic food pigment, this way creating an uncanny atmosphere of semi-garden, semi-laboratory of previously unknown species.

This project was key in our further artistic development, as we worked with sculptures for the first time. The combination of man-made and natural materials also remained one of the focal points in our later projects. It was particularly interesting to speculate how much this new development of forms of life is shaped by capital, especially rewiring life for more efficiency and productivity.

Pakui Hardware​​ in a statement to PLATFORM:VB (August 2017)