WeSurvive
PUTTY'S CORONATION is pleased to announce the opening of WeSurvive, a solo exhibit of ITP Alum Sebastian Morales’s biosculpture occupying a “dedicated desk” at the WeWork on 1 Little W. 12 St, New York, New York. The exhibition is open from March 9th through March 30th. The show is viewable by appointment only. In addition there will be two free Sunday seminars on March 17th and March 24th held at the WeWork.
WeSurvive March 9 - March 30, 2019
Sebastian Morales
In his new work Symbiosis.live, Sebastian Morales creates a speculative ecosystem where inorganic life forms and single-cell organisms coexist. Connecting servers to a bioreactor containing living cells, cyberbots in the form of crawlers, fetchers, scrapers, spammers, and hackingtools visit the server. As the bots move through the server, clicking on links and filling out forms, their movement releases food into a container of unicellular ciliates (Parameciums). The bots’ daily visits to the network become imperative for the Parameciums’ survival, and with it a new and precarious ecosystem is established. These cyberbots have become keepers of organic life - inhabiting estuary spaces in which single cells and primitive cyber organisms evolve into new hybrid forms that remain dependent on the bots for survival. A mortal struggle is established inside this new reality, a kind of cybernetic Darwinism. It’s about never pulling the plug and always needing to be plugged in.
Inside the WeWork at 1 Little West 12th Street, this bio-sculpture occupies one of the few “dedicated desks”. Located on the second floor and crammed into a small glass room with three other desks currently occupied by people, the Parameciums’ existence holds a mirror up to the world in which they are placed. At WeWork, a new ecosystem has also emerged in the form of its expansion into WeLive and WeGrow. The idea of work/life balance becoming ever the more blurred as our time in the workplace slowly becomes the very act of living. Placed inside one of the original WeWork offices, Symbosis.live asks us to think intentionally about how we work, grow, and live as technological influences are increasingly omnipresent. At what point do we unplug, go offline, disengage? At what point do we hold accountable the inordinate promises of technology and its advocates? At what point does it no longer become WeWork, WeLive, WeGrow, but instead, WeSurvive?
Sebastian Morales is a Mexico-born, New York-based artist, engineer, and researcher. He develops interactive works at the intersection of robotics, digital culture, and living systems. He received a BS in mechanical engineering from the Illinois Institute of Technology and a MPS in Interactive Telecommunications from New York University. Morales’s work has been exhibited in New York, Chicago, and San Francisco. As a roboticist for the collective tatoué, he has performed in Paris, Moscow, Brussels, Copenhagen, Belfort, and Lyon.