What is it?
“Creature/Machine” is a collaborative sculpture with natural artifacts as well as functional electronics: dried palm husks suspended from a 16ft sycamore root, variously treated, along with a solar-powered simulation of single-cellular life.
A crucial divide for our society and world: do we choose to live as creatures or as machines? This artwork is an unconventional pairing of two artists working in very different media: Chris Combs with industrial electronics, and Ceci Cole McInturff with organic ephemera.
In a new outdoor installation, here we materially symbolize the creature vs. machine divide, but integrate materials from both points of view to imply a third POV: there is no one-sided pro/con nor exit strategy—in the present, humans are living a conjoined reality as technology-augmented creatures and struggling as both.
Innovatively using natural artifacts as well as functional electronics – dried palm husks suspended from a 16’ sycamore root, variously treated, along with a solar-powered simulation of single-cellular life – the installation meaningfully observes, rather than seeks to settle anything.
It supports both science and mystery as essential and critical to human culture. It urges scrutiny of how we each think, act and speak about the world and its creatures, including ourselves. Its point of view holds a mirror up to life, the local, the future individual, and the mind.