CHIMERIA
2025-Project, Performance, Installation
In our technologically accelerated capitalist society, algorithms reduce the human body to an "exchangeable module" within the global workflow. In Gesture and Speech, André Leroi-Gourhan defines humanity by upright bipedal posture. However, he also foresaw the advance of automation would eventually forces us "to cease being Sapiens and to become something else."
CHIMERIA is an experimental bodily practice that, through a "twisting" appropriation of technology, dismantles the body schema of Homo sapiens and enables its rebirth as a new life form: the Chimera.
Using a head-mounted display, we "transplant" the human eye—the principal input terminal of capitalist labor and consumption—onto other parts of the body. When we begin to see with our toes, for instance, our feet become the "head," our buttocks become the "shoulders," and our arms become the "hind legs." The existing body schema is dismantled at its root.
The so-called "volunteers" who seek a new body were recruited through a publicly circulated phone number, and they undertook an intensive communal life in metropolitan Tokyo. Chairs, doorknobs, staircases, and every affordance of the environment, all designed for "humans with eyes in their heads," rejected them. In order to survive, they reconstructed their own norms: ingesting liquid food through tubes, employing wire-driven prosthetics, and developing a toilet for urinating from a kneeling posture. At the heart of the anthropocentric urban space, they established their own "Chimera-centric domain."
While this domain was open to outsiders, anyone who wished to observe its ecology had to "imitate" the environment and become part of it. There, the established "normal" social system was no longer absolute. From the Chimera's perspective, it is the upright biped human who is relativized as a "strange creature."
CHIMERIA is a quiet revolution against capitalist productivity and the principle of biological selection. It demonstrates that the body and the system we believe to be absolute can be readily dismantled by remarkably simple technology. In doing so, this practice brings into being a temporary yet undeniable other world. This other world would "demote" the reality we understand as singular and absolute into one of the countless possible realities.
Reconstruction of the Body
Reconstruction of the Environment
Mimetic Observation
Exhibition
CHIMERIA I (WHITEHOUSE, Tokyo)
Project Lead & Concept: Shin Hanagata
Chimeric Volunteers: Mio (Moe Yoshida), Sakaguchi (Tomoaki Sakaguchi), Yoshida (Kona Eguchi), Kumo (Yusaku Endo), Igarashi (Chihiro Igarashi), Haga (Haga Nanaha), Shikaya (Shin Hanagata)
Environment Fabrication: Takuto Ohta
Design Ethnographer: Shin Aoyama
Cinematography & Documentation: Takahiro Ueno
Curator: Tomohito Wakui
Art Direction: Arata Nagara
Hardware Engineering: Shin Hanagata
Suit Fabrication: Karu Miyoshi
Enclosure Fabrication: Juri Fujii
Production Support: Keiichi Hayashi
Web Development: Shin Hanagata
Special Thanks: Izumi Enaga, Funimu Someya
With support from: The Project to Support Emerging Media Arts Creators, Agency for Cultural Affairs; Arts Council Tokyo; KUMA Foundation