Hah! I just managed to pass off furry shit off for a thesis...
(Top mark, at that.)

It was a series of digital prints, this is what it looked like on the wall - an image and a separate bar with text (involving quotes on a subject) below. Since the quotes are in lithuanian and I'm a bit too busy to make exact english layouts of them (that would end up unreadable on a screen anyway), I'll just post the images themselves and add the [english] quotes in the descriptions.

I'll be posting the individual pieces one by one the next few days, these are the links to them, corresponding to the composition above:


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"Gaeabionta" is a taxonomic term for the entire cellular life on earth.

The series is about the relationship between "human" and "animal" and revolves around the idea of common ancestry and cultural heritage. A set of phantasmagorical visions, acts in a simplified Noh theater scene of the imagination, taking quotes as a starting place. Memetics and Bergson's ideas of Intuition and Élan vital (in L'Evolution créatrice) are at the core of the idea. There's a certain something common to Life, theater, culture and digital: they all involve a "code" (DNA, script, meme, binary code) that has to be interpreted in a certain way to become what it represents; the codes may be timeless abstractions, but their conrete manifestations are limited in time and space, like movies being played out, coming into existence for a short time, then disolving into nothingness and inexistence, an empty screen extending to infinity before and after. In such a pessimistic godless universe, every such short spark of life is infinitely valuable, never to be repeated. It also questions - if ideas as memes are in a way "alive" in the cultural environment of many minds and working/evolving similary to biological lifeforms, can creatures born and living in the imagination be considered "alive" in the same way? And the act of portraying them and expressing the imagination, thus allowing them to populate other minds - their procreation? The piece is mostly about how we view other lifeforms, and what it tells about us...


Some random thoughts of interest:

The dualism of image and text has roots in Bergon's comparison of intuition (image) and intellect (text).

The quotes themselves are memes (like genes), which give rise to the artwork via an interpreter (artist).

Noh theater is a highly developed Japanese art, involving use of masks, very minimalistic means of expression and actors' commitment to it from very childhood up to old age.

Seeing Life in a broader picture - how all life looks alike and behaves alike (being one huge family, after all), the blurring boundaries between different bodies and minds, how everything is interconnected - the contraposition between human and rest of nature (especially in western culture) becomes an unthinkable absurdity. It has to go, for the better of everyone involved.

Showing respect for other lifeforms may be the best way for us humans to accept our own nature.

If the most positive sentiments we have (like love, empathy, creativity, loyality...) are our biological heritage and not things we made, why is "animal" still a swear word?

Too often the "animal" (both other animals and our own nature) is only acceptable as long as it does what we require it to, it has to be controled, trained, handled, shackled or if all fails - killed...

The following isn't my idea, it was mentioned by my reviewer, but I think it's an excellent observation:
In christianity the animal was a soulless being, thus open to demonic possession. Always suspicious, its calling thriving in the shadows of evil. As noted by Focault, human has found the animal in its own nature in about 19 century, and along with it - the potential domain of evil. This was the price the modern westerner had to pay for deriving its genealogy no longer from god, but from natural evolution. This is how every westerner became a Jekyll, hiding Hyde.