In this video work, I construct a speculative, nightmarish laboratory—hidden within the bowels of a cave—where the boundaries between human anatomy and technology dissolve. Through composite animation, databending, and AI-generated imagery, the piece thrusts viewers into a dark, immersive environment where screens flicker with grotesque visions of the human body: mutated, dissected, reassembled, and perpetually in flux.
This laboratory is not just a site of scientific inquiry; it is a theatre of cruelty. Here, the human body is stripped of sanctity, reduced to raw material for experimentation—its flesh, muscles, organs, skin and its genetic material are subjected to endless manipulation. The protagonist, a monstrous prototype, is less a person than a cavy: a body to be torn apart and stitched back together, a specimen for scientific research, often aimless, a projection of our most disturbing desires to control, modify, and commodify life itself. The AI-generated audio is an echo, where a disembodied voice whispers indecipherable words over a bed of electronic noise. The effect is unsettling, amplifying the sense of alienation and objectification that pervades the work.
By foregrounding the body as a site of violence and transformation, the piece interrogates the loss of value and meaning in contemporary perceptions of life and flesh. It raises urgent questions: What does it mean to treat the body as an object, as an exhibition of atrocities, a commodity, or a projection? How do advances in AI and biotechnology threaten to erode the boundaries between the natural and the synthetic, the human and the inhuman?
My practice is rooted in the exploration of the human body as a contested site—one marked by conflict, transformation, cruelty, and horror. In this video, I employ compositing animation, AI-generated imagery, and databending techniques to construct a speculative laboratory, a hidden cave where the body is both subject and object, a locus for experimentation and horror.
The work draws on the visual and conceptual language of body horror, a genre that exposes the fragility and malleability of flesh, the body as an altered state. Here, the body is a substrate for manipulation—a prototype to be assembled, dismantled, and reconfigured at will. This vision is informed by contemporary debates around medical research, cosmetic and other products sold on our supermarket shelves, and the commodification of bodies, as well as the rise of AI and synthetic biology and synthetic body, synthetic life. I am particularly interested in the ethical and philosophical implications of treating the body as pure flesh, stripped of identity, agency, and value, or maybe the birth of a new flesh with new meanings, where identities are constantly mutating, a new agency and a new value of the body and life itself. The horror, I argue, is not inherent in the body’s form but in the ways it is used, abused, and transformed by external forces; the horror explodes from the inside out. The AI-generated audio, with its haunting, unintelligible whispers, further destabilises the viewer’s sense of reality, evoking the uncanny and the monstrous. What's that voice saying? It's a confession? A prayer? A call for mercy? A cryptic hymn of freedom?
