7K: new life form is a responsive audiovisual installation in which visitors find themselves immersed in a unique techno-ecosystem. A world also inhabited by plant life, microscopic organisms and a strange new class of engineered nano-beings. 7K’s vision of future reality features a custom-built photosynthesis chamber, electronic sensors and purpose-shot footage of life under the microscope to create an autonomous system in which visitors become active participants.
Human beings have lived in an organic environment that we classified as biological and sorted all of the beings into six organic kingdoms; with our own will to survive and procreate we became the origin, the maker of another kingdom, a kingdom much less ecological, biological and organic; a kingdom of various material tools, mental concepts, social organizations, new ways of using concepts from nature, in short, a kingdom of technology. This kingdom has been living and evolving along and with ourselves as species and has formed a new life, we are the origin but it also has a life of its own that grows by its own accord. Technology has a life that we explore, use and learn about like we learn about all other organic kingdoms of life and we also use it to explore, communicate, upgrade, cultivate nature that by now needs our intervention just to be, survive and prosper since it’s been so intertwined with technology that the latter has become a vital part of nature itself, it has become nature.
So in a way the conceptualization of 7K: new life form is as much about the past and present as it is about the future because technobiotope as we present them during this project already exist; actually most of the nature as we know it that we as human beings cultivated is a technobiotope because it can not exist any longer in the same way without our intervention. 7K’s technobiotopes at nanoscale are just an extension of this same kind of technobiotops into the future; a possible suggestion of life that is yet to come, or maybe is it already here?
7K: new life form, 2010
Saša Spačal
Technical support: Joby Harding, Tadej Droljc, dr. Aleš Kladnik
Photos: Damjan Švarc / Kapelica Gallery Archive
Project website: 7K: new life form
Production: MMC Kiberpipa with art director Maja Smrekar
Exhibitions
Alter(action) 2.0, Technium of Care, curator Marta de Menezes, Cultivamos Cultura, Museo Extremeño e Iberoamericano de Arte Contemporáneo – MEIAC, Badajoz, Spain [2022]
Symbiome – Economy of Symbiosis, Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova – MSUM+, Ljubljana, Slovenia [2016]
Wonder-Lab, Museum of Contemporary Art Vojvodina, Novi Sad, Serbia [2015]
Gallery Dimenzija napredka, Nova Gorica, Slovenia [2013]
Gallery of Contemporary Art, Celje, Slovenia [2013]
Device_art 4.012, Zagreb, Croatia [2012]
De:sonanz 2012, Skopje, Macedonia [2012]
Amber’11 / Next Ecology, Istanbul, Turkey [2011]
Enter 5 / Datapolis, Prague, Czech Republic [2011]
Haip 10 / New Nature, Ljubljana, Slovenia [2010]
MMC Kiberpipa, Ljubljana, Slovenia [2010]
Collection
Technium of Care is in the collection of the Cultivamos Cultura, São Luis, Portugal [2022]
The Technium of Care, 2022
Saša Spačal