life/like (2021)

• 75%
• 2021
• Audrey Robinovitz

'life/like' stages varied technological imitations of nature, and investigates the degree to which nature-as-symbol has itself evolved into algorithmic process. Utilizing the open source creative coding library p5.js, the outermost channels of video run through handmade javascript expressions modeling a spirograph and Brownian motion, respectively. The movement of the three video channels interact as interlaced found footage blends natural symbology with rote pattern, algorithmic generation, and most importantly, the visualization of both nature and technology's operational mechanisms. These representations are themselves inevitably crude and ineffectual, yet the border at which human knowledge attempts to integrate the natural or the techno-natural into its empirical organization is the onus of potential change. In time, the competing images crescendo into a virtual reality landscape, deeply artificial yet singular in its affective potential: a parallel nature, a transhumanist Eden.