Cryptobiosis
A collaborative project by Tom Richardson & Johannes Büttner
Various materials incl. computers, insects, bio-degradable promotional pens, 3D animation and Augmented Reality.
2022

Augmented Reality hosted by aprha.de
AR Sound: Johannes Klingenbiel
Photography & videography: Alwin Lay

"Cryptobiosis" is part of the exhibition "Die zwei Seiten der Medaille"
at mauer, Cologne and funded by Kunststiftung NRW.

"... Fäth’s rationalized, synthetic arrangements are answered by Johannes Büttner and Tom Richardson’s Cryptobiosis – a large, collaborative installation. Within a set of computer casings, stripped entirely of their technological innards, the two artists trap meal worms, locusts, crickets, centipedes, cockroaches, and isopods. These protein-rich bugs – displaced to foreign dwellings of steel, aluminum, and plastic – are fed pens made of corn starch, which, when excreted, are recycled to cast new pens, in a continuous metabolic cycle. Pens play an oft-forgotten role in the history of computation: before binary code, integrated circuitry, and liquid-crystal displays, mathematical calculations were written on paper, notated manually by so many anonymous hands.

In a 3D animation and augmented reality located in the gallery courtyard, chimeric bug-like creatures are metamorphosed through three life stages, co-habiting with the feces-starch pens, larvae, and younger nymphs in an abhorrent digital lab – which viewers are invited to explore on their smartphone or tablet devices.

With pitiless detachment, Büttner and Richardson’s fecund microenvironments rewind the temporal order of instrumental reason. The abstractions of modern science are equated with the secretions of arthropod ecosystems, symbolic logic with invertebrate instinct. Progress becomes regress, and the effect is to awaken us to the triumphal march of history, perhaps not as emancipation, but as impersonal compulsion: which is, after all, what György Lukács identified as the unwitting function of all historical fictions."
- extract of text by Michael Eby for the exhibition Die zwei Seiten der Medaille together with Rachel Fäth at Mauer, Cologne.

Exhibition made possible by Kunststiftung NRW.