MACROBES
Narratives of Post-Anthropocene Milieus
This project sits
halfway between documentary and fiction seeking to connect the mundane with the extraordinary by way of a speculative narrative. Stemming from the work of Gilbert Simondon and more precisely his concept of key-points, it suggests rethinking the status of humankind and its relation to machines in a post-Anthropocene world.
The fascination for architectural machines such as depicted in the work of Jan Kaplicky, Wolf Prix, and Francois Roche, among many others, led to exploring the uncommon ground that exists at the intersection between machines and microbes. This dramatic shift in scale and peculiar blend, allowed machines to gain liveliness and to develop as characters for the narrative.
The fascination for architectural machines such as depicted in the work of Jan Kaplicky, Wolf Prix, and Francois Roche, among many others, led to exploring the uncommon ground that exists at the intersection between machines and microbes. This dramatic shift in scale and peculiar blend, allowed machines to gain liveliness and to develop as characters for the narrative.
The action takes place within a vision speculating on a new nature that adds up to the altered layers of the Anthropocene era– the present geological epoch in which emerges fragments of deterritorialization sculpted and polished by our species. These are clear results of planet-scale domestication. Machines-microbes were then searching for a piece of the Earth as such to inhabit when they found Ile Rene-Levasseur, a remote island located in the North of Quebec in Canada. It screams out its anthropogenic ontogenesis as it pictures impact melt rocks surrounded by an annular artificial reservoir, perhaps the perfect candidate to host macrobes.
Macrobes – the pseudoscientific term under which the machines-microbes can now be recognized – are defined as hybrids embedded with a weird realism. They combine natural and artificial elements using processes of fusion and fission. They were made not born. They are synthetics with prostheses. These beings, apart from the status we bestowed them, thrive onto the landscape, the post-Anthropocene milieus. They use it and consume it in truly unexpected manners; inaccessible for us, the humans. They embrace this new era, where machines are free of their utilitarian functions. In this regard, humans are the tools and not the machines. The future of the world we inhabit is not only for us. In the act of building, we are also preparing habitats for new forms of life. Macrobes, as such, are not utterly asking to be understood but merely to be imagined and discovered.
Macrobes – the pseudoscientific term under which the machines-microbes can now be recognized – are defined as hybrids embedded with a weird realism. They combine natural and artificial elements using processes of fusion and fission. They were made not born. They are synthetics with prostheses. These beings, apart from the status we bestowed them, thrive onto the landscape, the post-Anthropocene milieus. They use it and consume it in truly unexpected manners; inaccessible for us, the humans. They embrace this new era, where machines are free of their utilitarian functions. In this regard, humans are the tools and not the machines. The future of the world we inhabit is not only for us. In the act of building, we are also preparing habitats for new forms of life. Macrobes, as such, are not utterly asking to be understood but merely to be imagined and discovered.
“
[The technical object] is beautiful when it encounters a singular and remarkable place in the world; the high voltage line is beautiful when it traverses a valley, the car when it turns, the train when it enters or exits a tunnel. The technical object is beautiful when it has encountered a ground that suits it, whose own figure it can be, in other words when it completes and expresses the world. The technical object can even be beautiful with respect to an object that is larger than itself serving as its ground, in some ways as its universe.
”
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Gilbert Simondon, Du mode d’existence des objets
techniques, 1958.
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