Text by CLOT Magazine
Artist Frederik De Wilde gravitates towards un/under-explored crossovers between art and science and, by extension, technology. For him, both art and science require creativity and imagination to question assumptions that everybody else has bought into. That is the hardest but also the most exciting part. He told CLOT Magazine in an interview two years ago.
He tends to blur the distinction between art and science in his daily crossover praxis. I think the most exciting things can occur in this liminal space or interstitial territory. This is, of course, not limited to disciplines, methodologies, media or materialities; it dwells and stretches out to psychology, phenomenology, the possibility of metamorphosis and phantasmagories, after images and trace effects. He continued.
One of his latest virtual exhibitions is Next Nature_Post Camouflage. In this exhibition, he imagines a speculative scenario where the artwork functions as a wake-up call and a starting point for adapting organisms in a Post-Natural Anthropocene world.
If humanity continues to flourish into the future, how will nature change? How might this genetic manipulation affect our own biology and evolutionary trajectory? Post Naturalism is a cultural process where organisms are bred to be fancied to satisfy specific cultural purposes. The alteration of nature that happened in the past is just the beginning of an era. New genetic tools promise a change in our ability to manipulate organisms as never seen before, not even in fiction. De Wilde explains in the exhibition’s statement.
