Gray Area Festival 2021: Worlding Protocol

REPLICANTS borrows its title from the fictional bioengineered beings introduced within the 1982 science fiction film Blade Runner. The exhibition’s framing environment, modeled after Queen’s Road Central in Hong Kong, extends a virtual reproduction of the street and surrounding buildings of Woaw Gallery where REPLICANTS will be featured. This digital inversion of physical space and materiality, while mirroring the malleability of the replica, more broadly considers the limitations and possibilities for techno-reproductions.

The entirety of the REPLICANTS exhibition will be offered as a singular NFT containing a compilation of artworks by participating artists featured therein. The REPLICANTS NFT will be released on October 29th, 2021 in tandem with its inclusion in, and the opening of, the group exhibition TEKNOLUST: OBJECTOPHILIC FUTURES at Woaw Gallery, Hong Kong.

30 second video advertisement stemming from the virtual world of UKI, a major science fiction world-building project currently in development. 

3D model of Annaberg sugar mill, courtesy of CyArk

CyArk 2019: Annaberg Plantation - LiDAR - Terrestrial, Photogrammetry. Collected by CyArk, Trimble. 

Distributed by Open Heritage 3D. https://doi.org/10.26301/vv0h-dq68

The pyramid of ULTRA WET - RECAPITULATION harnesses healing energy from its tip, while its four faces retell vital stories of feminine-masculine alignments.

This Pyramidal site/sight excavates the spiritual and technological understandings of pre-colonial Africa and ancient indigenous ways of life regarding energetic polarities. As our Westernized global world reveres and enforces duality, its binary ideology is omnipresent in our collective consciousness.

The dual paradigm of mxn-womxn, feminine-masculine, good-bad, right-wrong, light-dark, strong-weak, life-death and so on ... is woven into the fabric of our social, cultural and political territories. Rarely is it acknowledged that both energies are within all of us yearning for balance.

ULTRA WET - RECAPITULATION sets to unearth traces of a space-time beyond duality and the violent enforcement of gender norms. Viruses spread into our brains, lands and computers to lead us with fear and shame; birthing this age of disequilibrium - where celebrated toxic masculinities reigns and the feminine is shamed. It is urgent that we heal to reboot our systems.

The work's imagery travels from Credo Mutwa (South African traditional healer)'s village to sandy landscape of Egypt amid computerized emanations to reclaim the legacies of feminine and masculine energies.

As storytellers chant their litanies for survival, ULTRA WET-RECAPITULATION celebrates teh power of the erotic as a creative and transformative force to be nurtured and cherished. The pyramid echoes the remembrance of a collective sovereignty in tunes with the cycles of creation and destruction. What lies outside of exploitative and oppressive structures? Can you see, feel, imagine what it's like?

ULTRA WET-RECAPITULATION is an ode to the fertile ground we have been and can still be.