Sascha Pohflepp, in collaboration with Matthew Lutz and Alessia Nigretti

Sascha Pohflepp (1978, Cologne–2019, Berlin), Matthew Lutz (b. 1980, Pennsylvania, USA. Lives and works in Berlin), Alessia Nigretti (b. 1996, Catania, Italia. Lives and works in New York

Those Who, 2019
Multimedia installation with dynamic content, dimensions variable
Courtesy of the artist

Produced specially for The Coming World, Sascha Pohflepp’s artwork is based on his research at the State Darwin Museum in Moscow as part of the Garage Field Research program. Critically rethinking our understanding of evolution, and in particular the idea of the determinism of classical evolutionary theory that exists alongside “irrational” versions of phenogenesis, Pohflepp has created an imaginary extension to the Darwin Museum, which was one of the first museum displays in Europe to examine the theory of evolution. In this speculative museum, evolution is driven not by natural selection or genetic drift but by anthropogenic technology: a combination of synthetic biology and genetic engineering with artificial neural networks as sources of imagination.

Pohflepp believes that with the development of advanced biotechnology and artificial intelligence we are entering a new era in which evolutionary history may see an unexpectedly rapid rise in the diversity of man-made creatures. This spotlights questions of how artificial intelligence knows and imagines the world, how creative potential can be defined when the subject of creativity is life itself, and how natural and unnatural evolution might coexist in future.