WeSurvive

Sebastián Morales

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

PUTTY'S CORONATION is pleased to announce the opening of WeSurvive, a solo exhibit of Sebastian Morales’s bio-sculpture occupying a “dedicated desk” at the WeWork on 1 Little W. 12 St, New York, New York.  

Sebastián Morales, WeSurvive:  March 9 - March 30, 2019

At first, we went online for friends in chatrooms and Instant Messaging. Instead we found cats and scammers. Emails were mostly forwards from wacky uncles and photo albums were shared amongst close friends. Everything was made easier. Then it became something else. It is now affirmation through likes and protest through comments. It became a place of market romance. Of commerce. It created currencies and black markets. It is the first thing we wake up to in the morning and the last place we visit before going to bed. It is nowhere and everywhere. It encompasses our entire lives. Online was once a place we visited, now it is a place where we live.  

In his new work Symbiosis.live, Sebastián Morales creates a speculative ecosystem where inorganic life forms and single-cell organisms coexist. Connecting servers to a bioreactor containing living cells, cyberbots in the form of crawlers, fetchers, scrapers, spammers, and hacking tools visit the server. As the bots move through the server, clicking on links and filling out forms, their movement releases food into a container of unicellular ciliates (Parameciums). The bots’ daily visits to the network become imperative for the Parameciums’ survival, and with it a new and precarious ecosystem is established. These cyberbots have become keepers of organic life - inhabiting estuary spaces in which single cells and primitive cyber organisms evolve into new hybrid forms that remain dependent on the bots for survival. A mortal struggle is established inside this new reality, a kind of cybernetic Darwinism. It’s about never pulling the plug and always needing to be plugged in.

Inside the WeWork at 1 Little West 12th Street, this bio-sculpture occupies one of the few “dedicated desks”. Located on the second floor and crammed into a small glass room with three other desks currently occupied by people, the Parameciums’ existence holds a mirror up to the world in which they are placed. At WeWork, a new ecosystem has also emerged in the form of its expansion into WeLive and WeGrow. The idea of work/life balance becoming ever the more blurred as our time in the workplace slowly becomes the very act of living. Placed inside one of the original WeWork offices, Symbosis.live asks us to think intentionally about how we work, grow, and live as technological influences are increasingly omnipresent. At what point do we unplug, go offline, disengage? At what point do we hold accountable the inordinate promises of technology and its advocates?  At what point does it no longer become WeWork, WeLive, WeGrow, but instead, WeSurvive?

Sebastián Morales is a Mexico-born, New York-based artist, engineer, and researcher. He develops interactive works at the intersection of robotics, digital culture, and living systems. He received a BS in mechanical engineering from the Illinois Institute of Technology and a MPS in Interactive Telecommunications from New York University. Morales’s work has been exhibited in New York, Chicago, and San Francisco. As a roboticist for the collective tatoué, he has performed in Paris, Moscow, Brussels, Copenhagen, Belfort, and Lyon.

SUNDAY SESSIONS

Sunday, March 17 1pm | Corporate Culture: Benjamin Koditschek in conversation with Sebastián Morales

Description:  Do we live to work or work to live? In this seminar, artist Sebastian Morales along with designer and organizer Benjamin Koditschek begin with the WeWork slogan “Do What You Love” to engage in a conversation about corporate personhood, the ecosystems of work environments, and cyberbots finding purpose.

Sunday, March 24 1pm| Survival Dynamics: With Barrie Cline, Se¿o and Andy Lawson. Moderated by Clarinda Mac Low

Description:  How does real estate, labor, and living beings intersect materially and conceptually? Following the lead of WeSurvive activist labor artist Barrie Cline, urban planner Andy Lawson, and ecologically oriented digital artist Se¿o engage in a conversation around aestheticized labor, the nature of life, the transforming work world, and the pursuit of a stable place to live.