SMITH
Le vaisseau pomme de terre / - ou L'extase de M. Patate - Installation - 2024
présentée dans le cadre de l'exposition Panorama 26
We are all compost, not post-human.
Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, 2015
Mr Patate, the humanoid, sympoietic, petrochemical exuvia of his author with limbs branching out into tubers, levitates ecstatically in the heart of the great hall at Le Fresnoy (on the exact spot where his grandparents first met 76 years earlier). Inextensible, the iridescent moult of this holobiont is animated by a thousand ghostly memories. This mnemonic microbiota, composted by AI, adopts the trance-like state that accompanies any moult.
SMITH
An artist-researcher (PhD), SMITH explores new ways of relating to the visible and invisible world through “in-disciplinary” project-worlds. He is curious about the terrestrial and the cosmic, human and non-human persons, the imaginary and fiction. Thermal cameras, weightlessness, synthetic hormones, neon lights, trance, AI, hybridisation with plant technologies and extraterrestrial materials are all part of his fluid work, based on processes of self-experimentation and composed with techno-spiritual means that incorporate the dimensions of mystery, dream and the beyond. @traumsmith
