ONLINE
Xi-Clone Drēmzü
EXHIBITION
ARTSECT GALLERY
Xi-Clone Drēmzü: Ben Coiacetto x Dominique Cro
︎︎︎ACCESS THE SHOW
Dominique Cro Xi-Clone official logo, 2080 CGI animation / 1920 x 1080p / .mov / Apple ProRes 422 / 25fps / 207MB
Xi-Clone Drēmzü unites new artworks by Dominique Cro and Ben Coiacetto within a virtual zoetrope of writhing moiré designed and built by Typeone, in collaboration with ArtSect Gallery.
The setting uses the phenomenon of moiré as rich metaphorical terrain. 'Shape moiré', 'line moiré' and 'optical moiré speedup' are fascinating examples of gaps in information creating polarising effects and repetition with tiny differences forming radical results seemingly analogous to genetic experimentation. Artworks are scattered amongst pulsing moire data and thoughts, encapsulated in the neural pathway of a genetically modified Xi-Clone Drēmzü hybrid.
Dominique and Ben's work plays with humour and narrative devices to explore the constructive and destructive effects of gene manipulation at the hands of Biotech oligopolies.
Cro's 'Xi-Clone' is a fictional company that offers bespoke, extinct animal cloning and customisation. Set in 2080 with the Earth’s biodiversity on a steady decline, society has turned to cloning extinct species. The company culture of Xi-Clone is a speculative take on our future, if capitalism and individualism still continues to dominate culture. The in-ability to reduce overconsumption and to create significant change towards slowing the harmful impact of the anthropocene has left cloning as the only option to repopulate the world’s fauna. Xi-Clone seizes the opportunity to capitalise on these new technologies and instead of working to save the lost animals of the world they market their service as luxury, exotic pet cloners. Cro applies a retro futuristic lens to her study of organisms, creating combinations of fauna with computer generation imaging and digital design.
Coiacetto's 'Drēmzü' is an invented Balkan family name, biotech corporation, and faux translation of ‘dream zoo’. His artworks depict excerpts from a narrative in which 'Bengi' and a sleuth of mutants must survive a series of hellish game shows and find lost loved ones. The subtext explores how hidden power structures societally entwine cruelty, stimuli and commerce and how AI and lab grown beings may interpret love, relationships and sexuality.
The Xi-Clone Drēmzü space is an inescapable tunnel inspired by an Oroborous (a snake eating itself) and a Zoetrope, an early form of extended reality, where Victorians could see still images of animals replicated many times to appear as moving. The often humorous, sometimes nightmarish sounds in the tunnel are, like Xi-Clone Drēmzü creatures, manufactured from the sounds of real animals. Against nature, the experience is physically disconcerting, to the extent it may induce nausea.
Dominique Cro Zebear Xi-Clone card, 2080 Digital artwork / 16.5 x 23.4" / 300dpi / .tiff / 104MB
Ben Coiacetto Or The World Drowns in Thin Air 2021 / 96cm x 64cm / 300dpi / 16 bit colour / tiff file / 514 mb
Ben Coiacetto How Uncertain the Future Feels 2021 / 48 cm x 64cm / 300dpi / 16 bit colour / tiff file / 300mb
Dominique Cro
Xi-Clone advert extract, 2080
CGI animation / 3840 x 2160 / .mov / Apple ProRes 422 / 25fps / 1.24GB
In collaboration with CGI Artist Ryan Vautier
ABOUT TYPEONE
Typeone.org design and create virtual and immersive environments. Typeone is a London based interactive technology company, building immersive experiences in real life and virtual worlds. Typeone Realities creates virtual spaces.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Ben Coiacetto
I'm at home with surrealist ways, unriddling and ushering accidents. But I'll camp in any epoch and cook with any medium. Brewing truths and contradictions, the human condition simmers. My tent is flecked with Outsider. Post-internet, Folk, Op, Baroque, Dada and hammered in Romanticism. I flex a keen sense of drama and drink with tragicomic sleuths summoned in hypnagogia. We juggle howling stories. Bounty viewers hunting guts and mint imitations storm our meaning to oceans’ edge. Splashing outlooks, our scrap in the shallow trips into the rip. Now we're ascending up the maelstrom with bloated bodies hot balloons. I make jerky from one's brains and lace it to pantheonic masts. The wind picks up - we’re off. Sailing the sponge real. Plugging life’s plot holes with ink, pixels, paint.
I'm at home with surrealist ways, unriddling and ushering accidents. But I'll camp in any epoch and cook with any medium. Brewing truths and contradictions, the human condition simmers. My tent is flecked with Outsider. Post-internet, Folk, Op, Baroque, Dada and hammered in Romanticism. I flex a keen sense of drama and drink with tragicomic sleuths summoned in hypnagogia. We juggle howling stories. Bounty viewers hunting guts and mint imitations storm our meaning to oceans’ edge. Splashing outlooks, our scrap in the shallow trips into the rip. Now we're ascending up the maelstrom with bloated bodies hot balloons. I make jerky from one's brains and lace it to pantheonic masts. The wind picks up - we’re off. Sailing the sponge real. Plugging life’s plot holes with ink, pixels, paint.
Dominique Cro
It can be difficult to tell whether keeping time is more or less important since the invention of time travel.
You’ll probably never be late to a meeting again but you might still get lost.
The ability to travel at the speed of light was first achieved by mankind in 2255. There were whispers that it could bring the dissolution of borders, the abolition of the full time working week and may even cull the concept of time as a commodity. Mankind’s understanding of time moved from linear progression to a cyclic feedback loop, our voices once lost in viscosity now echoed back.
We were naive to think this new abundance of time would free us from selling our own.
Whilst our military developed travel surveillance systems such as Transmission, elites took the opportunity to cash in on ancient artefacts and treasures, triggering a wave of transtemporal colonialism. Just as text, television and the internet have been permeated by capitalism, time travel too became unreachable for those seeking it’s empowerment.
After years of unease, the AccessRevolution turned apathy into anger and hordes of protesters flooded the streets. Decades of riots and civil unrest finally ruptured the elitist glass ceiling. Time travel was declared a human right.
---------------------------------------------------------
Morning alarm sounds prematurely.
Starlink light pollution breaks through a crack in the curtain.
My legs leave bed first.
I’m an artist and an archivist. An earthling and a Yellow Access Keeper. My designated time period of observation is 2001 - 2100. My role is to document tipping points within the 21st century, with a focus on three major events that changed the course of humankind - the anthropocene, digitisation and the capitalocene.
A Timekeeper, Keeper for short, is a status that on paper can be obtained by all. The reality is quite different. Our national time travel system is called InTime, a hierarchical traffic light code in which red, yellow and green status grant varying levels of access.
Green Access - the rarest and most sought after Access card, belongs only to the wealthy; it carries a hefty price tag and the privilege of limitless travel.
Yellow Access - often purchased by a place of work, this Access card is restricted to work use only and is not permitted to be used for time tourism.
Red Access - the only affordable option, Red Access requires trading your data and your privacy for highly limited permissions.
The one rule of time travel is simple, ‘do not interact with any reality that is not of your own time’. You can think of Keepers, as documentary photographers, we travel, observe and let nature take its course. Operating as a fly on the wall system, InTime propels Keepers through centuries and millennia. We learn from past and future beings to change the course of our civilisation today.
Vitamin patch tickles the hairs on my arm.
I jump the high speed train to London.
Toying with the idea of limitless travel like a dolphin who caught the porpoise.
I can never quite let the thought go.
Time interruption is certain annihilation but would intervention change our society of capitalistic conditioning and consumer culture? Could we be better ancestors for those who occupy the future?
It can be difficult to tell whether keeping time is more or less important since the invention of time travel.
You’ll probably never be late to a meeting again but you might still get lost.
The ability to travel at the speed of light was first achieved by mankind in 2255. There were whispers that it could bring the dissolution of borders, the abolition of the full time working week and may even cull the concept of time as a commodity. Mankind’s understanding of time moved from linear progression to a cyclic feedback loop, our voices once lost in viscosity now echoed back.
We were naive to think this new abundance of time would free us from selling our own.
Whilst our military developed travel surveillance systems such as Transmission, elites took the opportunity to cash in on ancient artefacts and treasures, triggering a wave of transtemporal colonialism. Just as text, television and the internet have been permeated by capitalism, time travel too became unreachable for those seeking it’s empowerment.
After years of unease, the AccessRevolution turned apathy into anger and hordes of protesters flooded the streets. Decades of riots and civil unrest finally ruptured the elitist glass ceiling. Time travel was declared a human right.
---------------------------------------------------------
Morning alarm sounds prematurely.
Starlink light pollution breaks through a crack in the curtain.
My legs leave bed first.
I’m an artist and an archivist. An earthling and a Yellow Access Keeper. My designated time period of observation is 2001 - 2100. My role is to document tipping points within the 21st century, with a focus on three major events that changed the course of humankind - the anthropocene, digitisation and the capitalocene.
A Timekeeper, Keeper for short, is a status that on paper can be obtained by all. The reality is quite different. Our national time travel system is called InTime, a hierarchical traffic light code in which red, yellow and green status grant varying levels of access.
Green Access - the rarest and most sought after Access card, belongs only to the wealthy; it carries a hefty price tag and the privilege of limitless travel.
Yellow Access - often purchased by a place of work, this Access card is restricted to work use only and is not permitted to be used for time tourism.
Red Access - the only affordable option, Red Access requires trading your data and your privacy for highly limited permissions.
The one rule of time travel is simple, ‘do not interact with any reality that is not of your own time’. You can think of Keepers, as documentary photographers, we travel, observe and let nature take its course. Operating as a fly on the wall system, InTime propels Keepers through centuries and millennia. We learn from past and future beings to change the course of our civilisation today.
Vitamin patch tickles the hairs on my arm.
I jump the high speed train to London.
Toying with the idea of limitless travel like a dolphin who caught the porpoise.
I can never quite let the thought go.
Time interruption is certain annihilation but would intervention change our society of capitalistic conditioning and consumer culture? Could we be better ancestors for those who occupy the future?