Through the exhibition, it kept coming to me that human was always seeking to be a better version of ourselves and it’s only recent in human history that we are able to breakthrough some technological barriers which finally make some progress in augmenting human’s physical and biological to make improvements. Since I personally think that morality is just a concept which is generally accepted by the culture, there should be no right and wrong in the idea of augmenting human, even on genetically modifying a baby since culture will change depending on time and location, genetically modification might be the norm in 20 years time.

The work that I am most interested in was the Tardigotchi.

Tardigotchi is a work done by SWAMP collaboration with Tiago Rorke.

The basic idea of Tardigotchi is to have two pet, one tardigrade and an digital avatar of the tardigrade. A tardigrade is an eight legged water animal which could live in the harshest environment on earth and even outerspace, I remember watching a documentary years ago about astronaut sending tardigrate into the space to test if they can survive the vacuum and radiation. Not only the tardigrate survived, they lived happily and reproduced in space and this was the reason that I really love this project and is sure that there is a real tardigrate inside of the sphere.

Another reason that I really love this work as I had thought about doing a project last year for Interactive 2 which reflect on my childhood where we keep tamagotchi as pet and I wanted to recreate a project similar to tamagotchi but on a bigger scale, like a projection at ADM lounge and we will have an ADM pet. So this project resonate with me a lot personally, just by seeing this project lying in Human+ exhibition, I knew i will write about this instantly.

This is the Tardigotchi in Dublin Human+ exhibition and it seems so much nicer then the rapid prototyped model here in Singapore.