Medium: Interactive video
Dimensions: None
Price:
Description: Drawing upon the "RNA World" hypothesis, Primordium contrasts contemporary discoveries of self-replicating ribozymes with pre-modern philosophical visions of spontaneous generation. The work's visualization is derived from Stephan Rafler's 2012 generalized continuous cellular automata, "SmoothLife," with its undulating, protean forms recalling the eighteenth-century Urschleim: the primordial slime that German naturalist Lorenz Oken imagined as the universal substrate of all living matter. Through a simple keyboard interface, the viewer is invited to input nucleotides (A, U, G, C) to compose RNA sequences, acting as the seed for the digital genesis. This gesture invokes a biological variation of the Borgesian infinite library: might we stumble upon a self-sustaining sequence through sheer combinatorial chance? As citizen science games like Eterna invite players to fold RNA sequences and generative models create novel RNA structures, the threshold between emergence and invention, between the spontaneously generated and the deliberately composed, grows uncertain.
Primordium | 120710 -
