Topologies of the Real: Techne Shenzhen

ArchaeaBot was featured in Topologies of the Real: Techne Shenzhen at the Shenzhen Museum of Contemporary Art and Urban Planning (MoCAUP) in Shenzhen, China, during spring and summer 2023. The exhibition brought together work under three strands, Reality Interrupted, Datumsoria: The Return of the Real, and Multiverse: Ecology without Nature, examining how artistic practice has redefined ideas of reality under technological change.

Within that broader frame, ArchaeaBot contributed a speculative model of survival shaped by ecology, robotics, and post-human adaptation. Its presence in the exhibition placed May’s work within an international conversation about how contemporary art responds to accelerated technical systems, political instability, and altered relationships between humans, machines, and environments.

For May, that context matters because ArchaeaBot does not imagine future technology as neutral progress. Instead, it asks what kinds of life, memory, and intelligence might persist when existing systems have broken down. Shown in Shenzhen, the work extended his wider practice into a setting focused on how reality itself is produced, challenged, and remade through technological culture.