ELEMENTARY 2020

Year
2020

Author
Laura Beloff

Elementary (Beloff 2020)

Life, biology, climate – they are all embodied in liquid matter – and it is apparent that liquids play a central role in almost every aspect of our lives and our world. At the same time as we aim at controlling microscopic fluidic systems in laboratories, we are also challenged by liquids in a planetary scale from melting polar ice that further redistributes the weight of the planet and intervenes with the planet’s rotating movement in space.

In 1870’s Jules Verne wrote his famous stories about Captain Nemo’s underwater adventures with the submarine Nautilus. In these stories the sea is a dynamic environment and the submarine Nautilus is pictured as a part of this environment rather than travelling through it. In a comparable manner as Nautilus was perceived as a component of dynamic environment, scientific protocell research has understood the importance of a dynamic relationship between the environment and the protocell. According to modern- day scientists, a protocell is typically a self-organized, spherical collection of lipids with internal metabolism, which is capable of movement and self-replication. It is often considered as a comparable structure to a biological cell in living organisms, including an ability to uptake nutrients from the environment, expel waste and respond to environmental changes (Hanczyc 2009). “The question of how life might be obtained from nonliving materials is similar to that of how contemporary life originated, since contemporary life presumably arose from nonliving materials, but these two questions lead us in very different directions. The methods and conditions used to make protocells might be radically unlike those actually involved in life’s origins, and it is an entirely open question whether such new forms of life would or could ever evolve into anything like naturally existing life-forms.“ (Rasmussen et al. 2009) The quote is from an introduction to protocell research by scientists. The protocell researchers have focused on investigating the origin of life on the planet with the question: How did biological life emerge on earth? Embedded into this question is obviously also the question - what is life? These questions are wrapped around the hypothesis that biological life emerged due to specific chemistry mixed together that caused biochemical reactions in a particular point in the planet’s history with favorable conditions for emergence of life.

Elementary is a prototype that hosts a chemical soup with unexpected dynamics and a potential for life-like events and possibly also life itself. In this installation the chemical soup will be maintained by a human, who will become a part of the system’s potential for life. This maintenance person will make decisions concerning the chemistry-constellation (based on provided chemistry) and when to start a new experiment and discard the previous one. We (humans) have typically a desire for control over matter, also our society is based on shared rules. On the side of the Elementary projection box, a small-scale video is projected with elderly people playing volley-ball. A low-voice can be barely heard that speaks with a generated technological voice (and with a Slovak accent) the quote from scientists about creating life. Would you like to play God and create life? This work enables a possibility for this. What kind of recipe do you use? The Elementary-work points towards a future that forms at the intersection of technological and biological/chemical evolution.