Artificio at Museo Bolivariano de Arte Contemporáneo

Alex May and Anna Dumitriu premiered ArchaeaBot: Post Singularity Life-forms in a Post Climate Change World in Artificio at the Museo Bolivariano de Arte Contemporáneo in Santa Marta, Colombia, opening on 21 October 2021.

The exhibition provided the first public context for this new computer-generated video, which extends their earlier underwater robotic installation into a speculative future world shaped by climate breakdown, adaptation, and artificial life. Populated by ArchaeaBots and guided by neural networks carrying the last traces of human consciousness, the work shifts the project from sculptural presence into an animated environment where ecology, machine agency, and memory collapse into one another.

That premiere matters within May’s wider practice because it marks a move from the physical object to a fully simulated world without losing the conceptual pressure of the original installation. The video keeps asking what survives after environmental and technological rupture, but does so through immersion, atmosphere, and moving-image world-building rather than through the direct encounter with a single machine.