Second Nature

Samuel Capps    //    Diane Edwards    //    Joey Holder    //    Will Kendrick    //    Christopher MacInnes    //    Eva Papamargariti    //    Ben Skea    //    Andrew Sunderland    //    Lewk Wilmshurst

Fri 20 April – Mon 7 May 2018

71 Houldsworth Street, Glasgow, G3 8ED

Part of and supported by Glasgow International.




Second Nature; a deep rooted tendency that has become instinctive and habitual, but it is the habitual revision of nature that is now under threat. The origin of the phrase can be traced back to the latin of secundum naturam from medieval 14th century that stood in stark contrast to an alternative phrase of super naturam, that of which is superior to nature, such as God. Humanity’s own creationism has started moulding a new world, a new nature…..a second nature.

A world into which biology and technology has become consciously and unconsciously entwined in a post-natural coagulation of materiality. An environment in which plastic veins maintain balanced bodies, molten plastiglomerate rocks congeal on Earth’s shores and fluid RNA sequences flow from history into the laboratory. While the simultaneity of our virtual landscape enables us to live out dual lives, the transplantation of human consciousness into mutant vessels brings the prospect of whole new simulacrums of human experience. Algorithmic enzymes will catalyse to stimulate genetically modified wetware, opening the portal to neurobiological techno-transcendence.

As the Bio-Technology dichotomy slowly becomes homogenized, the symbiotic interrelationship can be seen in the ancient Greek word for life - Bios; and the core base level of a computer that a microprocessor uses to start the system - BIOS (basic input/output system). A gateway to a [un]natural feedback loop has been created, flowing from base original nature through computational genomics, into synthetic genes and then back into nature. An ouroboric awakening via cloned snakes.

There is nothing sacred, nothing divine about life as we know it, we are merely a flood of biological mass upon which life clings to as an instrument. We are the slop that bubbled away in the Primordial Soup of 3.5 billion years past and we are what squelched out of the oceans 430 million years ago. We are the anthropomorphic sludge that organised industrial production to define its own geological epoch and we shall continue this lineage into the Xenocene. Suffocating in the slime of Capital as it spews between the cracks of the destruction it has caused, the Bio-Tech Industrial complex drains genetic value from the veins of inhabitants of all species. Self aware Capital became an Accelerationist fabricated fetus implanted into the eviscerated body of Earth, an evolutionary displacement incubating under taut skin.

The sun now rises on a promethean dawn built on biologic scaffold materials composed of extracellular matrices and xenogeneic tissue.

Long live the new flesh....Long live the new bios.