Marli Davis

Warm Bodies, Ghostly Specimens, Stoic Machines | XII

Specimens: Morbid / Anatomical , Cultural / Archival , Flesh / Hybrid , Ghost / SkinsThese didactic collages are isolated excerpts from the Warm Bodies, Ghostly Specimens, Stoic Machines, digital e-book & printed textbook. To view the full book, please click on the attached links. Art, Science and Spirituality inform my systematically installed networks of cultural specimens. Accompanying didactic classification records dissection, modification and preservation of hauntological memorabilia within my familial home. Investigative phases recollect my fragmented Japanese heritage; personifying selfhood within a discourse amongst deceased ancestors. Warm Bodies, Ghostly Specimens, Stoic Machines materializes symbiosis by hybridizing tangible genealogy and intangible vitality.This assembled narrative was intended to analytically contextualize the contributing subject matter to each installation/experiment. A textbook; taxonomically operating as a laboratory record, transcribing evolutionary-variants and observational-data. Its didactic formatting re-establishes works through biostatistical documentation. Illustrating the investigative intent for each preserved cultural-specimen and subsequent visual manifestation. I’ve fabricated this personalized handbook by employing archival processes developed to create scientific manuals. Aspects of organic classification are researched and compositionally embedded, influenced by anatomical illustrations, medical diagrams and encyclopedia charts. Museological assemblage integrates and contrasts my present-day work. The implication of lost culture and forgotten language, situated within western-classification creates a historical discourse. Corresponding textual legends and numeric figures methodically map the accumulated information. Systematizing this intimate collection has become an informative process; depicting affiliations between, conditioned cybernetic-organisms and their tangible ontology. This resulting configuration functions as a guidebook throughout the varying reproductions of hauntological hybrids.