o—s—c*
Fig. #01. Landscape I — view of the organism’s insides before its digestion of contents, 2023.
What is the link between human, non-human and more-than-human? What kind of chimeric creatures lie at the intersection of all species? How can an organism grow and evolve in the digital realm? These are some of the questions that oriented an antidisciplinary research process focused on cultural and scientific knowledge about dark queer matter and creatures, aimed at defining what an “organism-without-a-body” (Organismus—Sine–Corpore) could look like, how it could act like, and how it could process informations while expanding its undetermined limbs across the cybernetic landscape. This investigation’s findings amalgamated into Transmedia Research Institute’s visual identity.
Among the main references that catalyzed such an unusual concept – such as Giger’s hybrid systems and Cronenberg’s mutant bodies – the most relevant has been Carpenter’s “Thing”: an alien creature that replicates human data and infiltrates across their spaces and communities in order to replace them and steal their parasitic role. The thing has, in fact, no proper shape by itself but rather lives on feeding upon other creatures.
Following the same path, the “organism” had to live and evolve by inhabiting multiple virtual landscapes and constantly eating and digesting new contents. It had to replicate data, bits, pixels, skins, sounds, interactions, textures, technologies, frameworks and lymphs. The organism replicates human tissues, displaying them as textures upon its rendered limbs. Its form is unstable, growing and changing as it keeps absorbing and digesting bits of data. Its body is chimeric and embraces queer transmateriality and transmediality. As Karen Barad wonders: “Can we (re)generate what was missing in fleshiness but materially present in virtuality? Can we (re)generate what our bodies sense but cannot yet touch? Can we trans/form, regenerate, dismember, and re- member anew fleshly bodies in their materiality?” (from Transmaterialities, 2015).
Fig. #04-05. Visualization of the O—S—C taking shape, displaying the totality of its organs / Landscape II — alternative view of the organism’s insides before its digestion of contents, 2023.
Transmedia Research Institute’s website is a cyber-lymphatic system: a virtual framework in which the institute-organism itself takes shape. By exploring its digital tissues, a brutalist brain in the form of a console manifests across the interface and responds to the inputs provided by the visitor. This modality of display works as a real-time dissection of the platform in which the digital entrails are left open as windows, and coding prompts run across them like blood pumping through the veins. The opening screen on the website showcases the genesis of the organism, while as the navigation process gets to its core, the platform reveals both its contents and its prompts.︎︎︎
On social platforms, instead, the O—S—C tries to project its physical shape by absorbing and digesting images, videos, sounds, texts and other contents, and thus showing the product of the dialogic, “symbiotic” process between the AI’s and human’s choices.
Fig. #07. Display of Transmedia Research Institute’s website opening showcasing the visual genesis of the O—S—C, 2023. The images that appear on the screen are willingly selected by an Artificial Intelligence and change every time; the same AI also highlights details and data of interest on each image as the human user is scrolling.