Cynthia Castro + Adrian DiCorato

The environment established by J.G. Ballard in The Drowned World suggests that human survival and evolution can no longer rely on the current scientific rationality and established equation of being and thought. A new science has emerged, interested in a realist metaphysics, where inanimate relations are reconsidered, and their metaphysical characteristics accepted. We lie in the Age of Asymmetry between humans and nonhumans where humans are becoming increasingly reliant on nonhuman entities for the survival and evolution of human history and thought. Is there a possibility to codify, to regulate, and finally to simulate and preserve the complexities of the biological human processes of cognition, memory, and information processes at any scale? Using elements from neuroscience, fractals in nature, and cellular biologies, ties are formed between an organism’s geometric structure and its cellular memory. The result of these conditions is a synthetic biology; material partly living and partly designed through molecular reconstruction. Both organic and inorganic materials are taken from the environment and remodeled at a base level to produce new synthetic biomaterials. From the merging of the synthetic and the biotic, a new organism is created, capable of larger data processing and information extraction from its surrounding ecology. Acting as an earth scavenger, the bio-mechanical structures can translate its findings and observations with humanity from long distances, giving humans new methods of knowledge production in the context of hostile environments.