ArchaeaBot: Post Singularity Life-forms in a Post Climate Change World
ArchaeaBot expands into a speculative underwater world shaped by adaptation, artificial life, and ecological aftermath in this computer-generated video.
ArchaeaBot: Post Singularity Life-forms in a Post Climate Change World is a collaborative computer-generated video that reimagines the ArchaeaBot project as an immersive underwater environment. Building on the earlier robotic installation, the work shifts from the physical presence of a machine to a moving image world populated by speculative life-forms shaped by climate breakdown, adaptation, and post-human survival. It uses the language of digital cinema to imagine a future ecosystem in which biology, technology, and environment can no longer be separated cleanly.
The piece extends May’s wider practice by using technological imagery to test how we picture what comes after loss. Rather than presenting the future as spectacle, it treats animation as a way of thinking through memory, transformation, and persistence in damaged worlds. The work continues his interest in how technology changes what we keep, what we lose, and what we think is real, here through a simulated environment that feels both archaeological and still to come.
Additional notes
- Created by Alex May and Anna Dumitriu as a new video work building on their earlier ArchaeaBot installation.
- Premiered on 20 October 2021 at Artificio, Museo Bolivariano de Arte Contemporaneo, Santa Marta, Colombia.
- Presented as a 1920 x 1080 MP4 video with a duration of 5 minutes and designed to loop.
- Uses an ambient underwater soundtrack to extend the sense of immersion and speculative world-building.