VIDA 10.0 - FIRST PRIZE
etoy.CORPORATION
Switzerland, 2006-07
About the project
Etoy.corporation launched the Mission Eternity Project in 2005, foregrounding on the one hand respect for the human longing to survive in some way after death, and on the other a sense of irony about dated sci-fi fantasies we contrive to satisfy that desire. The Sarcophagus is one materialization of this project. It is a mobile sepulchre that holds and displays portraits of those who wish to have their informational remains cross over into a digital afterlife. The size of a standard cargo container that can travel to any location in the world, the Sarcophagus has an immersive LED screen covering its walls, ceiling and floor. There, interactive digital portraits can be summoned via mobile phone or web browser from virtual capsules that are stored in the shared memory of thousands of networked electronic devices of Mission Eternity Angels (people who contribute a small part of their personal storage capacity to the mission, currently 765 of them; to date, 2 volunteers have been accepted for encapsulation). The data spectres that populate this tenuous memorial space are composed of details of lives lived, in visual, audio and text fragments. But when they are summoned in lo-res pixellated form in the Sarcophagus, they resemble one merged personality. The massing of details that we find in archives and records that keep the dead with us has a similar compositing effect, yet the Sarcophagus is also very unlike those. It gives us access to a novel social world generated among networked computer users who have a common goal of keeping something alive, which can invoke intense feelings such as care and wonder.
Career
Oron Catts: Artistic Director of SymbioticA, artist/researcher and curator. Founded the Tissue Culture and Art Project (TC&A) in 1996. Co-Founder and Artistic Director of SymbioticA - The Art & Science Collaborative Research Laboratory at The School of Anatomy & Human Biology, University of Western Australia. SymbioticA is the winner of the 2007 inaugural Golden Nica for Hybrid Arts in the Prix Ars Electronica.
Oron is trained in product design (BA Hon), and Visual Art (MA). Ionat Zurr artist/researcher of the TC&A, academic coordinator of SymbioticA. Ionat is currently completing her PhD that investigates the philosophies and ethics of Partial Life. Oron and Ionat are considered to conduct pioneering research in wet biology art practices and in particular the use of living tissue from complex organisms. Both were Research Fellows at The Tissue Engineering & Organ Fabrication Laboratory, Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School (2000-2001). They have exhibited and published internationally.