Carbon is a key element of life. The carbon cycle assumes life as a metabolic ring of growth, repro- duction, and degeneration – the conceptual foundation of prevailing biopolitics. aLifveForms’ first exhibition at K-T Z considers these arrangements of life in relation to the technological procedures of maintenance and renewal.

Set in a mixed reality, aLifveForms’ cyclical cosmology suggests re-considering the self not merely as a biological body, but one also ornamented by technology and extending into our atmospheric environ- ment. By re-subjecting the self to cycles of indefinable limits (beyond rationality and essentialism), it appears as an impossibly abstract body. aLifveForms spawn a being to embody the complexity of con- temporary capital flows, global reproduction technology, and fantasies of climate control. This plane- tary being has different organs, a different reproduction cycle, and a psycho-reality which is differ- ent from our common reality. The exhibition thus narrates the forking process of one of aLifveForms’ artificial identities, Transformella malor, into Transformella cinis. It opens both a physical reality with devices and environments built by the artificial identities, and an ornamented reality, allowing access to Transformella malors’ memory and projecting Transformella cinis’ future.

Transformella malor’s shrine is built of large scarred hides made from papier-mâché ReRoh-raw-material descending from the gallery walls and ceiling. In its center, they assembled artifacts and narrations of past ReproResearchRituals in Ikeality: latex-skins and other harvested bio-materials condensed as Kommunisate, as well as the DataBody, an inter-identity device that contains several psycho-realist language devices. Through the ornament, ReproDiagrams and a curved spatial body time mesh of appear- ances re-tells the SelfSister’s Reprovolution disrupting Ikeae Everysite (a rhizomatic system of IKEA showrooms that has rooted through the entire planet) and enables new social models of reproduction.

On the floor, four cylindrical ceramics symbolically incubate the organs of the new Transformella cinis’s impossible body. The plane of emergence unfolds through NailFont scriptures, logos and company names inscribed in the raw clay. Climeworks, metaphorically standing in for the lung, is a Swiss start- up company and the world’s first commercial business specialized in filtering carbon dioxide from the ambient air, pressing it into stone and thereby terraforming planet earth. Mosa Meat, the muscle, grows in-vitro beef, a NeverLife that is nevertheless subject to decay and entropy. Ancestry determines an individual’s genetic origins through the extraction of data, which, circling back to the ReproDiagrams in the shrine, endorses the stem cell as data material, breaking the cycle of reproduction. Lonité syn- thesizes diamonds from the carbon isolated from cremation ashes.

Superimposed by the ornament, an algorithmic score guides an alchemical coming into being in different locations. Several tools made of recombined baby buggies hanging along the wall refer to the labor of producing a high density of material through high energy input: burning the clay; Transformella cinis’ ashings of ReRoh-raw-material. Within thermodynamics in the common reality, all processes in the uni- verse move toward heat-death: a state of irreversible deterioration, devoid of potential. These laws trigger questions for aLifveForms’ artificial beings–How can cyclical reproduction introduce negentropy into worldmaking? Can it replenish the metabolism of a habitable world, reversing the carbon imaginary of extractivism while approaching life from its imminent catastrophic end?

curated by Sarah Johanna Theurer