Posthumous Adaptation

Posthumous Adaptations is an interactive installation, designed for the CulturalDC Mobile Art Gallery, Washington DC.

 

The installation, comprised of an interactive, hydraulic sculpture and an animation video, turns the space into an imaginary environment, both playful and sinister. Visitors are invited to interact with what seems to be a dead specimen; placed behind a transparent partition and in a sterile, lab-like room, a concrete creature is set in motion by hydraulic power and human weight. Watching the creature through the partition, the visitors become spectators to what might be a remainder of an ancient past, or a glimpse to a far future.

Activating the concrete sculpture with hydraulics references water as the mobilizer of rocks, people, and land; as a force of life as well as destruction. The act of pumping water becomes an attempt to return life to a fossil or movement to a dead structure; a collective effort or perhaps a hopeless action in the face of disaster. The sculpture is accompanied by an animation video, Entropia, which shows what might be the ruins of a war stricken city, where concrete creatures are the only life form that could survive in the rubble we left behind.