24-27 March 2022,
How can we escape? (Official Selection), Charlie Tweed | 03:59 min | 2021 | UK
How Can We Escape (2021) provides a speculative proposal for continuous ‘escape’, a plan for constantly morphing into new personas and post human forms. From a CGI fish, to underwater organisms, from AI designed creatures, to microbial animals, from the walk through for a new house, to dispersal as an artificial cloud. An entanglement of escape routes between different forms emerges, which constantly feed into and contaminate one another via porous borders between digital and physical forms, poor and HD images. In its script the video merges original writing from the artist with AI generated text that is spoken by its narrator producing unexpected connections, collaborations and language. Finally, it looks towards a merging of digital and biological materials via the 3D rendering of a fly which is sold as an NFT, and its source code converted in to a strand of DNA, which is then dispersed in water and activated as vegetal plant life.
As a result the work provides a satirical and critical account of the escape routes available to its human audience at this present moment, in relation to the COVID crisis, growing environmental destruction and ubiquitous technologies and data measurement that enable the digital capitalocene to continuously expand its extraction processes. It suggests that continuous movement and reformatting of body, voice, virtual and physical form is the only option that remains, a flexible morphing persona and a realignment of human life with all forms of non human, machinic and more than human life.