DE-EXTINCTION DREAM PALACE - Amy CUTLER

"DE-EXTINCTION DREAM PALACE will be a prototype from my residency on species revival as augmented reality experience, supported by the Leverhulme Centre for Anthropocene Biodiversity (LCAB). Using hypothetical archival sounds – such as the recent re-creation of the theoretical bioacoustics of Prophalangopsis obscura, an extinct insect species alive at the time of the dinosaurs – the project draws on ‘virtuality’ in both its sonic and visual materials. Spatially, the work is designed as a configuration of two screens (left and right) and two speakers (left and right) facing each other. Drawing on David Jaclin’s concept of de-extinction as both ‘dreaming’ and ‘cinematic chimera’ – and on cinema’s own cultural spatial history as ‘dream palace’ – I will explore ways of designing an experience related to the virtual past (left) and the virtual future (right).  The ordinary ways of designing and experiencing cinema – both sonic and visual – struggle to express the simultaneous disappearances-and-future-propositions of a being undergoing de-extinction, focusing instead on the centred experience of ‘now’. But between the fossil bone, the coded information, and the resurrected individual – where does the animal stand in this configuration? Drawing on both the spatial metaphor of left-to-right timelines, and disorienting audio-visual techniques linked to cues of flashback and flashforward, this work aims to spatialise the simultaneous loss-and-revival of virtual lives.

Rather than creating the full ‘multiplex’ installation, this can be delivered as a talk with a brief demonstration as part of the presentation. "