Multi-Human Urns
In Process
The first of the series is a vessel for a recently widowed individual to house the cremated remains of their partner, containing an adequate volume of space to one day accommodate the addition of the widow’s own ashes. The client has supplied us with two pieces of information: (X) the volume and weight of their partner’s cremated remains, and (Y) the client’s anticipated volume and weight at the time of their future expiration. From this data, we’ve extrapolated an anticipated total weight and mass for the combined cremated remains of both individuals, which determines the volume of space required to house them. Within this vessel, the couple’s remains will be mixed and irrevocably united. Without access to any raw bioinformatics for our bereaved client’s partner, they have requested that the artifact embody a common stream of genetic information shared by all human beings — and by proxy, the two of them. Therefore, the vessel’s membrane is wrapped in a curvilinear spiral of esoteric architectonic articulations that figuratively encrypt the opening sequence of the gene for oxytocin (OXT) production, the neurotransmitter commonly referred to as the “love hormone” and associated with feelings of empathy, trust, and arousal. Serving as a new membranous skin for its occupants, the vessel shares genetic information with their former corporeal state. Building from the work of figures including Donna Haraway,1 Bruno Latour,2 and N. Katherine Hayles,3 this project challenges conventional notions of identity and embodiment, and traditional delineations between objecthood and subjecthood. Within this ovoid vessel, the couple will one day reunite and metamorphose into a unified new beginning; an alternative state of human being.
- 1. Donna J. Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century” in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York; Routledge, 1991, originally published in Socialist Review LXXX, 1985): 149-181.
- 2. Bruno Latour, trans. Catherine Porter, We Have Never Been Modern (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993, originally in French, 1991).
- 3. N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999).
PROJECTS: ABODE // CABIN // SEMI-SUB-URBAN // STATION // GREEN // TRANSPOSITORY // TEA-CRETE // LIGHTS // PENDANT // RINGS // NEO-CAIRNS // VESSELS // THESES: METAMATERIALISM (Human Being) // POST-MORDIAL (MIT SMArchS) // ISOTOPIA (Syracuse BArch) // HUMANS: KRIS // JODY
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