SURVIVAL UNIT

For their collaborative exhibition Survival Unit, artists Dean Kenning and John Timberlake generate an ecology of sound, movement and image in the gallery. Their ecological environment consists of semi-autonomous robotic ‘crawlers’ and sonorous plant-like ‘sessiles’ bounded by the gallery walls which are painted to create a sense of illusionistic space. As the close-to-the-ground crawlers negotiate the gallery floor, avoiding obstacles and live-streaming what they see on a system of monitors inhabiting the landscape, the sessiles respond, making deep electronic noises as the crawlers approach their bases and disappear beneath their canopies.

The exhibition plays with the forms of sci-fi genre whilst tapping into ideas from biosemiotics and machine intelligence. It initiates a post-humanist, ecological set-up where elements are symbiotically connected in real time, leading to unpredictability and liveness alongside and beyond human interaction. It is inspired, in part, by Gregory Bateson who sought to expand the concepts of both evolution and mind beyond the conventional boundaries of an individual organism and an individual human’s nervous system. For Bateson, the evolutionary ‘unit of survival’ under natural selection is not the individual or the species, but the ‘flexible organism-in-its-environment’.