Under the Viral Shadow: Conference
· talk
Alex May and Anna Dumitriu presented ArchaeaBot at the online conference accompanying Under the Viral Shadow, organised by Art Laboratory Berlin.
Alex May and Anna Dumitriu presented ArchaeaBot: A Post Singularity and Post Climate Change Life-form at Under the Viral Shadow: Conference, an online international conference organised by Art Laboratory Berlin on 9 October 2021.
The one-day event accompanied the wider Under the Viral Shadow exhibition and brought together artists, theorists, scientists, and technologists to consider biological, cybernetic, and social networks in the age of technoscience and infection. May and Dumitriu’s contribution appeared in Panel A: Bodies, Organisms and Machines, where ArchaeaBot sat alongside other works examining how biological life, machine systems, and environmental conditions become entangled.
That setting sharpened a key strand of May’s wider practice. ArchaeaBot already imagines survival after climate breakdown and technological transformation, but in this conference context the work was discussed explicitly through networks, infection, and the unstable boundary between organism and machine. The talk made the project’s speculative world legible as part of a broader cultural and scientific conversation rather than as an isolated installation.