HYBRID, 2021

HYBRID, 2021

HYBRID, 2021 is an avatar constructed by combining my head with that of my husband’s, joining them down the center between our eyes. This sculpture, cast in white bronze and standing 21.5″ high, is both a personal and speculative imagining of our avatar in a world in which our brains have been uploaded into the same data container. This is the shell in which we are reborn as a data set for eternity. This work also exists as a motion capture video in which the experience of being uploaded together is explored still further, providing a narrative for this conjoined existence. It is a meditation on our ideas about immortality, but also about whether human embodiment can be transferred into another form and survive in any recognizable fashion. In a previous work, I sutured our bodies together at the groin, creating a work that reads as a hermaphrodite. Both works also tease at our notions of coupledom and interdependence.

(photo credit: Alan Rideout)