SIGGRAPH 99 Art Gallery: technOasis
RE-Constructing EVE
August 8-13, 1999 Los Angeles

In 1886 Villier de L'Isle Adam, a French pre-symbolist, wrote his novel "L'Eve Future," a fictional fantasy about Thomas Edison building a cybernetic organism, chimera and mythic hybrid of a machine and human being. RE-constructing EVE is a "blue print," an "assemblage" of symbolic materials, interactions and historical anatomies of possible bodies. Bodies, as in Villier's work, are conceived as partial identities, as a work-in-part as well as whole. The morphology is an animated dynamo, organized on an imagined network of metonymic figures, integrated muscles, prosthetic bones and biotic circuits. The inside and outside substance is created using a juxtaposition of synthetic models and found recycled digital materials, created or downloaded, stored, manipulated and rearranged in a mesh of difference / sex / woman / man / machine / history / order / poem. RE-constructing EVE begins as a concept: a futuristic re/presentation of an unchangeable bio-logical structuring of the mechanical/digital body. It becomes a process: an internal deconstruction of ideals and re-definition of the Adam/male and Eve/female. It ends as result: a mechanical / digital painting where the brush strokes of the canvas have been substituted by pixels or polymorphous "bytes" of information. "RE-constructing EVE," a topographic evocation of genetic engineering is ultimately a transitional work, an invitation to explore the "multiplicity" and the complex relation between organism and machine, and hopefully, as in Villier's narrative text, reflects in this case a bridge between the twentieth century and the twenty-first century.