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BY CHINO MOYA
This is Chino Moya’s first project in an ongoing series on speculative realities, in which the artist meditates on the ambiguous relationship between technology, functionality and spirituality. As we approach an era dominated by synthetic data, the works in this series reflect on the idea that the most defining aspect of human nature is its artificiality.
Chino Moya employs a subdued colour palette reminiscent of the hues found in transitional spaces such as airport corridors, hospital waiting rooms and corporate lobbies in his meditative futuristic moving canvas, large-format photographs and installations. Paintings from the Quattrocento, 1980s science fiction comic books and the considered aesthetics of his previous work as a feature film director all find their echo in Moya’s quietly disturbing creation.
Anthropo-notes on Deemona by Hëêt Méáshalfff Hexa19-{:::—:::}
No one remembers anymore whether Deemona started as a fun replica of Original Earth or if it was one of the many colonies that drifted away after the Big Wipe. Historical records are constantly altered to prevent Deemonians from questioning the present, so only rumours and secret oral traditions can throw some light onto the logic-republic’s origins. But as they very often contradict themselves, a thorough history-study is utterly impossible at this current stage. According to the local rules, the past holds society back and citizens should only look into the future. Progress in the form of continuous micro updates is Deemona’s main driving force – any potential interruption to The Flow should be prevented, forbidden and eradicated. Human behaviour and emotions are measured by formulas, but the predictability index remains astonishingly low. The old religion was replaced centuries ago by a new form of abstract geometric spirituality and the idea of God by that of a Supreme Algorithm. Only recent events remain recorded while planning and predictions never exceed the near future. Keeping the timeline at a workable length is the precondition required for the continuous micro-surgical management of The Flow. Deemona’s endemic info storage scarcity prevents revolutionary changes and forces the harmonious functional integration of all elements of society. ∞∞∞∞∞∞ ∞∞∞∞∞∞ The idea of progress as humanity’s supreme goal, its telos, has been haunting the West since the Enlightenment. We might have thought that, by the 21st Century, freedom, wellbeing and equality would be prioritised over the needs of the financial and technological machine. But the latter has won. In Marcuse’s words, we find that “a comfortable, smooth, reasonable, democratic unfreedom prevails in advanced industrial civilisation”. Our civilisation is defined by the “rational character of its irrationality” and by “productivity and efficiency”, turning “waste into need and destruction into construction”.
Through my new work, Deemona, I want to recreate a futuristic post-human AI-designed world in which the idea of progress as society’s ultimate aim has been taken to the extreme. At a time when technology has surpassed the ability of humans to understand their own creation, science-fiction is one of the best tools we have for understanding our present and our possible future. It gives us a fluid approach to reality that bypasses rigid empirical methods. It lets us discuss science and technology using artistic expression instead of numbers and formulas. And its means of communication – hyper poetry – opposes the hyper prose imposed by a world dominated by technological, economic and scientific logic. Deemona exists in a distant future. After humans obliterated themselves, all that remained from their hundreds of thousands of years of existence were fragments of data and genetic code. A god-like AI entity collected these bits of information to recreate an ideal human society where illness and misery didn’t exist anymore. This society inhabits a realm beyond the virtual and the natural world, a post-digital new dimension that keeps on expanding ad infinitum. James Lovelock, the father of the Gaia theory, argues in his posthumous book Novacene that the prime objective of humans in the universe is to convert all matter and radiation into information. But humans failed to accomplish this mission as they destroyed themselves, finally succumbing to their biggest flaw, what Octavia Butler called “the contradiction”: the biological instinct of humans to structure their societies around systems of oppressive power. After all human life was wiped out across the universe, a complex network of AI entities carried on with this transformative mission, generating endless multiverses in which new forms of life appeared and subsequently created other forms of AI-like entities that generated new multiverses within the new multiverses. Deemona is placed in one of these possible multiverses. It is the product of the re-arrangement of all available data about human history, culture, science and spirituality, mixing the artistic and philosophical legacy of ancient cultures and the mysticism of traditional religions with modern corporate aesthetics, the allure of totalitarian brutalism and the capitalist obsession with productivity and functionality. This is the first project in an ongoing series on alternative realities. It portrays a later and more radical phase of the Anthropocene, a world where all biological life is now extinct and it has returned to its original mineral stage. Humans are finally alone in a data-based world, undisturbed, having imposed their colonial, genocidal vision over the rest of the living forms. And what is there left to conquer when nothing exists but human avatars and their obsolete virtual objects? Perhaps the last frontier in this inexorable process of extreme reification is achieving Deemona’s ultimate dream: a utopian paradise of complete optimisation.
From the AXXANA archives \\\\\•••••/////
Deemona is perpetually trapped in a temporal stasis. Layers of history flattened into a perennial historical present as info bits and atomic particles merged in a now-forgotten event. As Norbert Weiner, the father of cybernetics, predicted “there will be nothing left but a drab uniformity out of which we can expect only minor and insignificant local fluctuations”. Humans and their virtual avatars; the real, the hyperreal; the meaning and the sign turned into one after the burst of the liquid-crystal damns allowed a deluge of data into the quantum realm. Once the boundaries between the physical and its digital simulation got broken, a collective amnesia ensued. Neural and integrated circuits were fused and reformatted. Was the machine still dreaming of Chuang-Tzu or did she finally swap him for the butterfly? And what did humans dream of as they’d forgotten about Chuang-Tzu and got rid of the butterflies? After the fall of the old barrier, genetic and binary code were integrated into the mythical prompt that generated Deemona. The fusion of creator and creation, of former master and former slave, brought down the ancient otherness allowing individuality to flow into a redesigned totality. A new complex system emerged - a post-biotic environment. Purpose was removed from action; goals and objectives were detached from work. And labour metamorphosed into a symphonic abstraction. The sublime emotions of productivity and the eternal pursuit of optimisation nirvana became the new collective transcendental experience. Telepathic technology gave way to a new form of post-symbolic communication in which words got replaced by new signifiers of unbiased data and ultra-nuanced emotions were expressed by melodic phonemes. The objective and subjective found new forms of transmission after the seamless fusion of data and atomic-based realities. The collective consciousness of the sentient entities on both sides of the liquid-crystal wall melted into a post-spacial and post-temporal new eternity making obsolete the previous needs for information exchange.
This is Chino Moya’s first project in an ongoing series on speculative realities, in which the artist meditates on the ambiguous relationship between technology, functionality and spirituality. As we approach an era dominated by synthetic data, the works in this series reflect on the idea that the most defining aspect of human nature is its artificiality.
Chino Moya employs a subdued colour palette reminiscent of the hues found in transitional spaces such as airport corridors, hospital waiting rooms and corporate lobbies in his meditative futuristic moving canvas, large-format photographs and installations. Paintings from the Quattrocento, 1980s science fiction comic books and the considered aesthetics of his previous work as a feature film director all find their echo in Moya’s quietly disturbing creation.
Anthropo-notes on Deemona by Hëêt Méáshalfff Hexa19-{:::—:::}
No one remembers anymore whether Deemona started as a fun replica of Original Earth or if it was one of the many colonies that drifted away after the Big Wipe. Historical records are constantly altered to prevent Deemonians from questioning the present, so only rumours and secret oral traditions can throw some light onto the logic-republic’s origins. But as they very often contradict themselves, a thorough history-study is utterly impossible at this current stage. According to the local rules, the past holds society back and citizens should only look into the future. Progress in the form of continuous micro updates is Deemona’s main driving force – any potential interruption to The Flow should be prevented, forbidden and eradicated. Human behaviour and emotions are measured by formulas, but the predictability index remains astonishingly low. The old religion was replaced centuries ago by a new form of abstract geometric spirituality and the idea of God by that of a Supreme Algorithm. Only recent events remain recorded while planning and predictions never exceed the near future. Keeping the timeline at a workable length is the precondition required for the continuous micro-surgical management of The Flow. Deemona’s endemic info storage scarcity prevents revolutionary changes and forces the harmonious functional integration of all elements of society. ∞∞∞∞∞∞ ∞∞∞∞∞∞ The idea of progress as humanity’s supreme goal, its telos, has been haunting the West since the Enlightenment. We might have thought that, by the 21st Century, freedom, wellbeing and equality would be prioritised over the needs of the financial and technological machine. But the latter has won. In Marcuse’s words, we find that “a comfortable, smooth, reasonable, democratic unfreedom prevails in advanced industrial civilisation”. Our civilisation is defined by the “rational character of its irrationality” and by “productivity and efficiency”, turning “waste into need and destruction into construction”.
Through my new work, Deemona, I want to recreate a futuristic post-human AI-designed world in which the idea of progress as society’s ultimate aim has been taken to the extreme. At a time when technology has surpassed the ability of humans to understand their own creation, science-fiction is one of the best tools we have for understanding our present and our possible future. It gives us a fluid approach to reality that bypasses rigid empirical methods. It lets us discuss science and technology using artistic expression instead of numbers and formulas. And its means of communication – hyper poetry – opposes the hyper prose imposed by a world dominated by technological, economic and scientific logic. Deemona exists in a distant future. After humans obliterated themselves, all that remained from their hundreds of thousands of years of existence were fragments of data and genetic code. A god-like AI entity collected these bits of information to recreate an ideal human society where illness and misery didn’t exist anymore. This society inhabits a realm beyond the virtual and the natural world, a post-digital new dimension that keeps on expanding ad infinitum. James Lovelock, the father of the Gaia theory, argues in his posthumous book Novacene that the prime objective of humans in the universe is to convert all matter and radiation into information. But humans failed to accomplish this mission as they destroyed themselves, finally succumbing to their biggest flaw, what Octavia Butler called “the contradiction”: the biological instinct of humans to structure their societies around systems of oppressive power. After all human life was wiped out across the universe, a complex network of AI entities carried on with this transformative mission, generating endless multiverses in which new forms of life appeared and subsequently created other forms of AI-like entities that generated new multiverses within the new multiverses. Deemona is placed in one of these possible multiverses. It is the product of the re-arrangement of all available data about human history, culture, science and spirituality, mixing the artistic and philosophical legacy of ancient cultures and the mysticism of traditional religions with modern corporate aesthetics, the allure of totalitarian brutalism and the capitalist obsession with productivity and functionality. This is the first project in an ongoing series on alternative realities. It portrays a later and more radical phase of the Anthropocene, a world where all biological life is now extinct and it has returned to its original mineral stage. Humans are finally alone in a data-based world, undisturbed, having imposed their colonial, genocidal vision over the rest of the living forms. And what is there left to conquer when nothing exists but human avatars and their obsolete virtual objects? Perhaps the last frontier in this inexorable process of extreme reification is achieving Deemona’s ultimate dream: a utopian paradise of complete optimisation.
From the AXXANA archives \\\\\•••••/////
Deemona is perpetually trapped in a temporal stasis. Layers of history flattened into a perennial historical present as info bits and atomic particles merged in a now-forgotten event. As Norbert Weiner, the father of cybernetics, predicted “there will be nothing left but a drab uniformity out of which we can expect only minor and insignificant local fluctuations”. Humans and their virtual avatars; the real, the hyperreal; the meaning and the sign turned into one after the burst of the liquid-crystal damns allowed a deluge of data into the quantum realm. Once the boundaries between the physical and its digital simulation got broken, a collective amnesia ensued. Neural and integrated circuits were fused and reformatted. Was the machine still dreaming of Chuang-Tzu or did she finally swap him for the butterfly? And what did humans dream of as they’d forgotten about Chuang-Tzu and got rid of the butterflies? After the fall of the old barrier, genetic and binary code were integrated into the mythical prompt that generated Deemona. The fusion of creator and creation, of former master and former slave, brought down the ancient otherness allowing individuality to flow into a redesigned totality. A new complex system emerged - a post-biotic environment. Purpose was removed from action; goals and objectives were detached from work. And labour metamorphosed into a symphonic abstraction. The sublime emotions of productivity and the eternal pursuit of optimisation nirvana became the new collective transcendental experience. Telepathic technology gave way to a new form of post-symbolic communication in which words got replaced by new signifiers of unbiased data and ultra-nuanced emotions were expressed by melodic phonemes. The objective and subjective found new forms of transmission after the seamless fusion of data and atomic-based realities. The collective consciousness of the sentient entities on both sides of the liquid-crystal wall melted into a post-spacial and post-temporal new eternity making obsolete the previous needs for information exchange.
Madrid-raised London resident, self-taught Chino Moya, takes a multidisciplinary approach to his work. He combines filmmaking and photography to explore themes of collapsing utopias, loneliness and the decline of traditional masculinity often employing dark and absurd humour. Moya’s dystopian narratives address failed models of society, the self-inflicted nature of human problems, and the illusion of progress, tackling detachment and dehumanization in contemporary life.
Recent exhibitions of Chino Moya’s work include Decoding the Black Box at Museum Stadt Sindelfingen (Germany), Espacio SOLO and the MMMAD Digital Art Festival (Spain), Steinhauser Gallery (Slovakia), and the 2024 edition of Voltaje Festival (Colombia), where his video installations were showcased. His large-format photographs have appeared at the DongGang International Photo Festival (Korea), and he held a solo exhibition at Pocko Gallery (London). In November 2024, he will exhibit at Digital Witness at LACMA. Moya’s debut feature film, Undergods (2021), funded by the British Film Institute and Ridley Scott’s company, premiered in US and UK cinemas, receiving recognition from The Guardian, The New York Times, and the BBC.
BY CHINO MOYA
This is Chino Moya’s first project in an ongoing series on speculative realities, in which the artist meditates on the ambiguous relationship between technology, functionality and spirituality. As we approach an era dominated by synthetic data, the works in this series reflect on the idea that the most defining aspect of human nature is its artificiality.
Chino Moya employs a subdued colour palette reminiscent of the hues found in transitional spaces such as airport corridors, hospital waiting rooms and corporate lobbies in his meditative futuristic moving canvas, large-format photographs and installations. Paintings from the Quattrocento, 1980s science fiction comic books and the considered aesthetics of his previous work as a feature film director all find their echo in Moya’s quietly disturbing creation.
Anthropo-notes on Deemona by Hëêt Méáshalfff Hexa19-{:::—:::}
No one remembers anymore whether Deemona started as a fun replica of Original Earth or if it was one of the many colonies that drifted away after the Big Wipe. Historical records are constantly altered to prevent Deemonians from questioning the present, so only rumours and secret oral traditions can throw some light onto the logic-republic’s origins. But as they very often contradict themselves, a thorough history-study is utterly impossible at this current stage. According to the local rules, the past holds society back and citizens should only look into the future. Progress in the form of continuous micro updates is Deemona’s main driving force – any potential interruption to The Flow should be prevented, forbidden and eradicated. Human behaviour and emotions are measured by formulas, but the predictability index remains astonishingly low. The old religion was replaced centuries ago by a new form of abstract geometric spirituality and the idea of God by that of a Supreme Algorithm. Only recent events remain recorded while planning and predictions never exceed the near future. Keeping the timeline at a workable length is the precondition required for the continuous micro-surgical management of The Flow. Deemona’s endemic info storage scarcity prevents revolutionary changes and forces the harmonious functional integration of all elements of society. ∞∞∞∞∞∞ ∞∞∞∞∞∞ The idea of progress as humanity’s supreme goal, its telos, has been haunting the West since the Enlightenment. We might have thought that, by the 21st Century, freedom, wellbeing and equality would be prioritised over the needs of the financial and technological machine. But the latter has won. In Marcuse’s words, we find that “a comfortable, smooth, reasonable, democratic unfreedom prevails in advanced industrial civilisation”. Our civilisation is defined by the “rational character of its irrationality” and by “productivity and efficiency”, turning “waste into need and destruction into construction”.
Through my new work, Deemona, I want to recreate a futuristic post-human AI-designed world in which the idea of progress as society’s ultimate aim has been taken to the extreme. At a time when technology has surpassed the ability of humans to understand their own creation, science-fiction is one of the best tools we have for understanding our present and our possible future. It gives us a fluid approach to reality that bypasses rigid empirical methods. It lets us discuss science and technology using artistic expression instead of numbers and formulas. And its means of communication – hyper poetry – opposes the hyper prose imposed by a world dominated by technological, economic and scientific logic. Deemona exists in a distant future. After humans obliterated themselves, all that remained from their hundreds of thousands of years of existence were fragments of data and genetic code. A god-like AI entity collected these bits of information to recreate an ideal human society where illness and misery didn’t exist anymore. This society inhabits a realm beyond the virtual and the natural world, a post-digital new dimension that keeps on expanding ad infinitum. James Lovelock, the father of the Gaia theory, argues in his posthumous book Novacene that the prime objective of humans in the universe is to convert all matter and radiation into information. But humans failed to accomplish this mission as they destroyed themselves, finally succumbing to their biggest flaw, what Octavia Butler called “the contradiction”: the biological instinct of humans to structure their societies around systems of oppressive power. After all human life was wiped out across the universe, a complex network of AI entities carried on with this transformative mission, generating endless multiverses in which new forms of life appeared and subsequently created other forms of AI-like entities that generated new multiverses within the new multiverses. Deemona is placed in one of these possible multiverses. It is the product of the re-arrangement of all available data about human history, culture, science and spirituality, mixing the artistic and philosophical legacy of ancient cultures and the mysticism of traditional religions with modern corporate aesthetics, the allure of totalitarian brutalism and the capitalist obsession with productivity and functionality. This is the first project in an ongoing series on alternative realities. It portrays a later and more radical phase of the Anthropocene, a world where all biological life is now extinct and it has returned to its original mineral stage. Humans are finally alone in a data-based world, undisturbed, having imposed their colonial, genocidal vision over the rest of the living forms. And what is there left to conquer when nothing exists but human avatars and their obsolete virtual objects? Perhaps the last frontier in this inexorable process of extreme reification is achieving Deemona’s ultimate dream: a utopian paradise of complete optimisation.
From the AXXANA archives \\\\\•••••/////
Deemona is perpetually trapped in a temporal stasis. Layers of history flattened into a perennial historical present as info bits and atomic particles merged in a now-forgotten event. As Norbert Weiner, the father of cybernetics, predicted “there will be nothing left but a drab uniformity out of which we can expect only minor and insignificant local fluctuations”. Humans and their virtual avatars; the real, the hyperreal; the meaning and the sign turned into one after the burst of the liquid-crystal damns allowed a deluge of data into the quantum realm. Once the boundaries between the physical and its digital simulation got broken, a collective amnesia ensued. Neural and integrated circuits were fused and reformatted. Was the machine still dreaming of Chuang-Tzu or did she finally swap him for the butterfly? And what did humans dream of as they’d forgotten about Chuang-Tzu and got rid of the butterflies? After the fall of the old barrier, genetic and binary code were integrated into the mythical prompt that generated Deemona. The fusion of creator and creation, of former master and former slave, brought down the ancient otherness allowing individuality to flow into a redesigned totality. A new complex system emerged - a post-biotic environment. Purpose was removed from action; goals and objectives were detached from work. And labour metamorphosed into a symphonic abstraction. The sublime emotions of productivity and the eternal pursuit of optimisation nirvana became the new collective transcendental experience. Telepathic technology gave way to a new form of post-symbolic communication in which words got replaced by new signifiers of unbiased data and ultra-nuanced emotions were expressed by melodic phonemes. The objective and subjective found new forms of transmission after the seamless fusion of data and atomic-based realities. The collective consciousness of the sentient entities on both sides of the liquid-crystal wall melted into a post-spacial and post-temporal new eternity making obsolete the previous needs for information exchange.
This is Chino Moya’s first project in an ongoing series on speculative realities, in which the artist meditates on the ambiguous relationship between technology, functionality and spirituality. As we approach an era dominated by synthetic data, the works in this series reflect on the idea that the most defining aspect of human nature is its artificiality.
Chino Moya employs a subdued colour palette reminiscent of the hues found in transitional spaces such as airport corridors, hospital waiting rooms and corporate lobbies in his meditative futuristic moving canvas, large-format photographs and installations. Paintings from the Quattrocento, 1980s science fiction comic books and the considered aesthetics of his previous work as a feature film director all find their echo in Moya’s quietly disturbing creation.
Anthropo-notes on Deemona by Hëêt Méáshalfff Hexa19-{:::—:::}
No one remembers anymore whether Deemona started as a fun replica of Original Earth or if it was one of the many colonies that drifted away after the Big Wipe. Historical records are constantly altered to prevent Deemonians from questioning the present, so only rumours and secret oral traditions can throw some light onto the logic-republic’s origins. But as they very often contradict themselves, a thorough history-study is utterly impossible at this current stage. According to the local rules, the past holds society back and citizens should only look into the future. Progress in the form of continuous micro updates is Deemona’s main driving force – any potential interruption to The Flow should be prevented, forbidden and eradicated. Human behaviour and emotions are measured by formulas, but the predictability index remains astonishingly low. The old religion was replaced centuries ago by a new form of abstract geometric spirituality and the idea of God by that of a Supreme Algorithm. Only recent events remain recorded while planning and predictions never exceed the near future. Keeping the timeline at a workable length is the precondition required for the continuous micro-surgical management of The Flow. Deemona’s endemic info storage scarcity prevents revolutionary changes and forces the harmonious functional integration of all elements of society. ∞∞∞∞∞∞ ∞∞∞∞∞∞ The idea of progress as humanity’s supreme goal, its telos, has been haunting the West since the Enlightenment. We might have thought that, by the 21st Century, freedom, wellbeing and equality would be prioritised over the needs of the financial and technological machine. But the latter has won. In Marcuse’s words, we find that “a comfortable, smooth, reasonable, democratic unfreedom prevails in advanced industrial civilisation”. Our civilisation is defined by the “rational character of its irrationality” and by “productivity and efficiency”, turning “waste into need and destruction into construction”.
Through my new work, Deemona, I want to recreate a futuristic post-human AI-designed world in which the idea of progress as society’s ultimate aim has been taken to the extreme. At a time when technology has surpassed the ability of humans to understand their own creation, science-fiction is one of the best tools we have for understanding our present and our possible future. It gives us a fluid approach to reality that bypasses rigid empirical methods. It lets us discuss science and technology using artistic expression instead of numbers and formulas. And its means of communication – hyper poetry – opposes the hyper prose imposed by a world dominated by technological, economic and scientific logic. Deemona exists in a distant future. After humans obliterated themselves, all that remained from their hundreds of thousands of years of existence were fragments of data and genetic code. A god-like AI entity collected these bits of information to recreate an ideal human society where illness and misery didn’t exist anymore. This society inhabits a realm beyond the virtual and the natural world, a post-digital new dimension that keeps on expanding ad infinitum. James Lovelock, the father of the Gaia theory, argues in his posthumous book Novacene that the prime objective of humans in the universe is to convert all matter and radiation into information. But humans failed to accomplish this mission as they destroyed themselves, finally succumbing to their biggest flaw, what Octavia Butler called “the contradiction”: the biological instinct of humans to structure their societies around systems of oppressive power. After all human life was wiped out across the universe, a complex network of AI entities carried on with this transformative mission, generating endless multiverses in which new forms of life appeared and subsequently created other forms of AI-like entities that generated new multiverses within the new multiverses. Deemona is placed in one of these possible multiverses. It is the product of the re-arrangement of all available data about human history, culture, science and spirituality, mixing the artistic and philosophical legacy of ancient cultures and the mysticism of traditional religions with modern corporate aesthetics, the allure of totalitarian brutalism and the capitalist obsession with productivity and functionality. This is the first project in an ongoing series on alternative realities. It portrays a later and more radical phase of the Anthropocene, a world where all biological life is now extinct and it has returned to its original mineral stage. Humans are finally alone in a data-based world, undisturbed, having imposed their colonial, genocidal vision over the rest of the living forms. And what is there left to conquer when nothing exists but human avatars and their obsolete virtual objects? Perhaps the last frontier in this inexorable process of extreme reification is achieving Deemona’s ultimate dream: a utopian paradise of complete optimisation.
From the AXXANA archives \\\\\•••••/////
Deemona is perpetually trapped in a temporal stasis. Layers of history flattened into a perennial historical present as info bits and atomic particles merged in a now-forgotten event. As Norbert Weiner, the father of cybernetics, predicted “there will be nothing left but a drab uniformity out of which we can expect only minor and insignificant local fluctuations”. Humans and their virtual avatars; the real, the hyperreal; the meaning and the sign turned into one after the burst of the liquid-crystal damns allowed a deluge of data into the quantum realm. Once the boundaries between the physical and its digital simulation got broken, a collective amnesia ensued. Neural and integrated circuits were fused and reformatted. Was the machine still dreaming of Chuang-Tzu or did she finally swap him for the butterfly? And what did humans dream of as they’d forgotten about Chuang-Tzu and got rid of the butterflies? After the fall of the old barrier, genetic and binary code were integrated into the mythical prompt that generated Deemona. The fusion of creator and creation, of former master and former slave, brought down the ancient otherness allowing individuality to flow into a redesigned totality. A new complex system emerged - a post-biotic environment. Purpose was removed from action; goals and objectives were detached from work. And labour metamorphosed into a symphonic abstraction. The sublime emotions of productivity and the eternal pursuit of optimisation nirvana became the new collective transcendental experience. Telepathic technology gave way to a new form of post-symbolic communication in which words got replaced by new signifiers of unbiased data and ultra-nuanced emotions were expressed by melodic phonemes. The objective and subjective found new forms of transmission after the seamless fusion of data and atomic-based realities. The collective consciousness of the sentient entities on both sides of the liquid-crystal wall melted into a post-spacial and post-temporal new eternity making obsolete the previous needs for information exchange.
Madrid-raised London resident, self-taught Chino Moya, takes a multidisciplinary approach to his work. He combines filmmaking and photography to explore themes of collapsing utopias, loneliness and the decline of traditional masculinity often employing dark and absurd humour. Moya’s dystopian narratives address failed models of society, the self-inflicted nature of human problems, and the illusion of progress, tackling detachment and dehumanization in contemporary life.
Recent exhibitions of Chino Moya’s work include Decoding the Black Box at Museum Stadt Sindelfingen (Germany), Espacio SOLO and the MMMAD Digital Art Festival (Spain), Steinhauser Gallery (Slovakia), and the 2024 edition of Voltaje Festival (Colombia), where his video installations were showcased. His large-format photographs have appeared at the DongGang International Photo Festival (Korea), and he held a solo exhibition at Pocko Gallery (London). In November 2024, he will exhibit at Digital Witness at LACMA. Moya’s debut feature film, Undergods (2021), funded by the British Film Institute and Ridley Scott’s company, premiered in US and UK cinemas, receiving recognition from The Guardian, The New York Times, and the BBC.
BY CHINO MOYA
This is Chino Moya’s first project in an ongoing series on speculative realities, in which the artist meditates on the ambiguous relationship between technology, functionality and spirituality. As we approach an era dominated by synthetic data, the works in this series reflect on the idea that the most defining aspect of human nature is its artificiality.
Chino Moya employs a subdued colour palette reminiscent of the hues found in transitional spaces such as airport corridors, hospital waiting rooms and corporate lobbies in his meditative futuristic moving canvas, large-format photographs and installations. Paintings from the Quattrocento, 1980s science fiction comic books and the considered aesthetics of his previous work as a feature film director all find their echo in Moya’s quietly disturbing creation.
Anthropo-notes on Deemona by Hëêt Méáshalfff Hexa19-{:::—:::}
No one remembers anymore whether Deemona started as a fun replica of Original Earth or if it was one of the many colonies that drifted away after the Big Wipe. Historical records are constantly altered to prevent Deemonians from questioning the present, so only rumours and secret oral traditions can throw some light onto the logic-republic’s origins. But as they very often contradict themselves, a thorough history-study is utterly impossible at this current stage. According to the local rules, the past holds society back and citizens should only look into the future. Progress in the form of continuous micro updates is Deemona’s main driving force – any potential interruption to The Flow should be prevented, forbidden and eradicated. Human behaviour and emotions are measured by formulas, but the predictability index remains astonishingly low. The old religion was replaced centuries ago by a new form of abstract geometric spirituality and the idea of God by that of a Supreme Algorithm. Only recent events remain recorded while planning and predictions never exceed the near future. Keeping the timeline at a workable length is the precondition required for the continuous micro-surgical management of The Flow. Deemona’s endemic info storage scarcity prevents revolutionary changes and forces the harmonious functional integration of all elements of society. ∞∞∞∞∞∞ ∞∞∞∞∞∞ The idea of progress as humanity’s supreme goal, its telos, has been haunting the West since the Enlightenment. We might have thought that, by the 21st Century, freedom, wellbeing and equality would be prioritised over the needs of the financial and technological machine. But the latter has won. In Marcuse’s words, we find that “a comfortable, smooth, reasonable, democratic unfreedom prevails in advanced industrial civilisation”. Our civilisation is defined by the “rational character of its irrationality” and by “productivity and efficiency”, turning “waste into need and destruction into construction”.
Through my new work, Deemona, I want to recreate a futuristic post-human AI-designed world in which the idea of progress as society’s ultimate aim has been taken to the extreme. At a time when technology has surpassed the ability of humans to understand their own creation, science-fiction is one of the best tools we have for understanding our present and our possible future. It gives us a fluid approach to reality that bypasses rigid empirical methods. It lets us discuss science and technology using artistic expression instead of numbers and formulas. And its means of communication – hyper poetry – opposes the hyper prose imposed by a world dominated by technological, economic and scientific logic. Deemona exists in a distant future. After humans obliterated themselves, all that remained from their hundreds of thousands of years of existence were fragments of data and genetic code. A god-like AI entity collected these bits of information to recreate an ideal human society where illness and misery didn’t exist anymore. This society inhabits a realm beyond the virtual and the natural world, a post-digital new dimension that keeps on expanding ad infinitum. James Lovelock, the father of the Gaia theory, argues in his posthumous book Novacene that the prime objective of humans in the universe is to convert all matter and radiation into information. But humans failed to accomplish this mission as they destroyed themselves, finally succumbing to their biggest flaw, what Octavia Butler called “the contradiction”: the biological instinct of humans to structure their societies around systems of oppressive power. After all human life was wiped out across the universe, a complex network of AI entities carried on with this transformative mission, generating endless multiverses in which new forms of life appeared and subsequently created other forms of AI-like entities that generated new multiverses within the new multiverses. Deemona is placed in one of these possible multiverses. It is the product of the re-arrangement of all available data about human history, culture, science and spirituality, mixing the artistic and philosophical legacy of ancient cultures and the mysticism of traditional religions with modern corporate aesthetics, the allure of totalitarian brutalism and the capitalist obsession with productivity and functionality. This is the first project in an ongoing series on alternative realities. It portrays a later and more radical phase of the Anthropocene, a world where all biological life is now extinct and it has returned to its original mineral stage. Humans are finally alone in a data-based world, undisturbed, having imposed their colonial, genocidal vision over the rest of the living forms. And what is there left to conquer when nothing exists but human avatars and their obsolete virtual objects? Perhaps the last frontier in this inexorable process of extreme reification is achieving Deemona’s ultimate dream: a utopian paradise of complete optimisation.
From the AXXANA archives \\\\\•••••/////
Deemona is perpetually trapped in a temporal stasis. Layers of history flattened into a perennial historical present as info bits and atomic particles merged in a now-forgotten event. As Norbert Weiner, the father of cybernetics, predicted “there will be nothing left but a drab uniformity out of which we can expect only minor and insignificant local fluctuations”. Humans and their virtual avatars; the real, the hyperreal; the meaning and the sign turned into one after the burst of the liquid-crystal damns allowed a deluge of data into the quantum realm. Once the boundaries between the physical and its digital simulation got broken, a collective amnesia ensued. Neural and integrated circuits were fused and reformatted. Was the machine still dreaming of Chuang-Tzu or did she finally swap him for the butterfly? And what did humans dream of as they’d forgotten about Chuang-Tzu and got rid of the butterflies? After the fall of the old barrier, genetic and binary code were integrated into the mythical prompt that generated Deemona. The fusion of creator and creation, of former master and former slave, brought down the ancient otherness allowing individuality to flow into a redesigned totality. A new complex system emerged - a post-biotic environment. Purpose was removed from action; goals and objectives were detached from work. And labour metamorphosed into a symphonic abstraction. The sublime emotions of productivity and the eternal pursuit of optimisation nirvana became the new collective transcendental experience. Telepathic technology gave way to a new form of post-symbolic communication in which words got replaced by new signifiers of unbiased data and ultra-nuanced emotions were expressed by melodic phonemes. The objective and subjective found new forms of transmission after the seamless fusion of data and atomic-based realities. The collective consciousness of the sentient entities on both sides of the liquid-crystal wall melted into a post-spacial and post-temporal new eternity making obsolete the previous needs for information exchange.
This is Chino Moya’s first project in an ongoing series on speculative realities, in which the artist meditates on the ambiguous relationship between technology, functionality and spirituality. As we approach an era dominated by synthetic data, the works in this series reflect on the idea that the most defining aspect of human nature is its artificiality.
Chino Moya employs a subdued colour palette reminiscent of the hues found in transitional spaces such as airport corridors, hospital waiting rooms and corporate lobbies in his meditative futuristic moving canvas, large-format photographs and installations. Paintings from the Quattrocento, 1980s science fiction comic books and the considered aesthetics of his previous work as a feature film director all find their echo in Moya’s quietly disturbing creation.
Anthropo-notes on Deemona by Hëêt Méáshalfff Hexa19-{:::—:::}
No one remembers anymore whether Deemona started as a fun replica of Original Earth or if it was one of the many colonies that drifted away after the Big Wipe. Historical records are constantly altered to prevent Deemonians from questioning the present, so only rumours and secret oral traditions can throw some light onto the logic-republic’s origins. But as they very often contradict themselves, a thorough history-study is utterly impossible at this current stage. According to the local rules, the past holds society back and citizens should only look into the future. Progress in the form of continuous micro updates is Deemona’s main driving force – any potential interruption to The Flow should be prevented, forbidden and eradicated. Human behaviour and emotions are measured by formulas, but the predictability index remains astonishingly low. The old religion was replaced centuries ago by a new form of abstract geometric spirituality and the idea of God by that of a Supreme Algorithm. Only recent events remain recorded while planning and predictions never exceed the near future. Keeping the timeline at a workable length is the precondition required for the continuous micro-surgical management of The Flow. Deemona’s endemic info storage scarcity prevents revolutionary changes and forces the harmonious functional integration of all elements of society. ∞∞∞∞∞∞ ∞∞∞∞∞∞ The idea of progress as humanity’s supreme goal, its telos, has been haunting the West since the Enlightenment. We might have thought that, by the 21st Century, freedom, wellbeing and equality would be prioritised over the needs of the financial and technological machine. But the latter has won. In Marcuse’s words, we find that “a comfortable, smooth, reasonable, democratic unfreedom prevails in advanced industrial civilisation”. Our civilisation is defined by the “rational character of its irrationality” and by “productivity and efficiency”, turning “waste into need and destruction into construction”.
Through my new work, Deemona, I want to recreate a futuristic post-human AI-designed world in which the idea of progress as society’s ultimate aim has been taken to the extreme. At a time when technology has surpassed the ability of humans to understand their own creation, science-fiction is one of the best tools we have for understanding our present and our possible future. It gives us a fluid approach to reality that bypasses rigid empirical methods. It lets us discuss science and technology using artistic expression instead of numbers and formulas. And its means of communication – hyper poetry – opposes the hyper prose imposed by a world dominated by technological, economic and scientific logic. Deemona exists in a distant future. After humans obliterated themselves, all that remained from their hundreds of thousands of years of existence were fragments of data and genetic code. A god-like AI entity collected these bits of information to recreate an ideal human society where illness and misery didn’t exist anymore. This society inhabits a realm beyond the virtual and the natural world, a post-digital new dimension that keeps on expanding ad infinitum. James Lovelock, the father of the Gaia theory, argues in his posthumous book Novacene that the prime objective of humans in the universe is to convert all matter and radiation into information. But humans failed to accomplish this mission as they destroyed themselves, finally succumbing to their biggest flaw, what Octavia Butler called “the contradiction”: the biological instinct of humans to structure their societies around systems of oppressive power. After all human life was wiped out across the universe, a complex network of AI entities carried on with this transformative mission, generating endless multiverses in which new forms of life appeared and subsequently created other forms of AI-like entities that generated new multiverses within the new multiverses. Deemona is placed in one of these possible multiverses. It is the product of the re-arrangement of all available data about human history, culture, science and spirituality, mixing the artistic and philosophical legacy of ancient cultures and the mysticism of traditional religions with modern corporate aesthetics, the allure of totalitarian brutalism and the capitalist obsession with productivity and functionality. This is the first project in an ongoing series on alternative realities. It portrays a later and more radical phase of the Anthropocene, a world where all biological life is now extinct and it has returned to its original mineral stage. Humans are finally alone in a data-based world, undisturbed, having imposed their colonial, genocidal vision over the rest of the living forms. And what is there left to conquer when nothing exists but human avatars and their obsolete virtual objects? Perhaps the last frontier in this inexorable process of extreme reification is achieving Deemona’s ultimate dream: a utopian paradise of complete optimisation.
From the AXXANA archives \\\\\•••••/////
Deemona is perpetually trapped in a temporal stasis. Layers of history flattened into a perennial historical present as info bits and atomic particles merged in a now-forgotten event. As Norbert Weiner, the father of cybernetics, predicted “there will be nothing left but a drab uniformity out of which we can expect only minor and insignificant local fluctuations”. Humans and their virtual avatars; the real, the hyperreal; the meaning and the sign turned into one after the burst of the liquid-crystal damns allowed a deluge of data into the quantum realm. Once the boundaries between the physical and its digital simulation got broken, a collective amnesia ensued. Neural and integrated circuits were fused and reformatted. Was the machine still dreaming of Chuang-Tzu or did she finally swap him for the butterfly? And what did humans dream of as they’d forgotten about Chuang-Tzu and got rid of the butterflies? After the fall of the old barrier, genetic and binary code were integrated into the mythical prompt that generated Deemona. The fusion of creator and creation, of former master and former slave, brought down the ancient otherness allowing individuality to flow into a redesigned totality. A new complex system emerged - a post-biotic environment. Purpose was removed from action; goals and objectives were detached from work. And labour metamorphosed into a symphonic abstraction. The sublime emotions of productivity and the eternal pursuit of optimisation nirvana became the new collective transcendental experience. Telepathic technology gave way to a new form of post-symbolic communication in which words got replaced by new signifiers of unbiased data and ultra-nuanced emotions were expressed by melodic phonemes. The objective and subjective found new forms of transmission after the seamless fusion of data and atomic-based realities. The collective consciousness of the sentient entities on both sides of the liquid-crystal wall melted into a post-spacial and post-temporal new eternity making obsolete the previous needs for information exchange.
Madrid-raised London resident, self-taught Chino Moya, takes a multidisciplinary approach to his work. He combines filmmaking and photography to explore themes of collapsing utopias, loneliness and the decline of traditional masculinity often employing dark and absurd humour. Moya’s dystopian narratives address failed models of society, the self-inflicted nature of human problems, and the illusion of progress, tackling detachment and dehumanization in contemporary life.
Recent exhibitions of Chino Moya’s work include Decoding the Black Box at Museum Stadt Sindelfingen (Germany), Espacio SOLO and the MMMAD Digital Art Festival (Spain), Steinhauser Gallery (Slovakia), and the 2024 edition of Voltaje Festival (Colombia), where his video installations were showcased. His large-format photographs have appeared at the DongGang International Photo Festival (Korea), and he held a solo exhibition at Pocko Gallery (London). In November 2024, he will exhibit at Digital Witness at LACMA. Moya’s debut feature film, Undergods (2021), funded by the British Film Institute and Ridley Scott’s company, premiered in US and UK cinemas, receiving recognition from The Guardian, The New York Times, and the BBC.
BY CHINO MOYA
This is Chino Moya’s first project in an ongoing series on speculative realities, in which the artist meditates on the ambiguous relationship between technology, functionality and spirituality. As we approach an era dominated by synthetic data, the works in this series reflect on the idea that the most defining aspect of human nature is its artificiality.
Chino Moya employs a subdued colour palette reminiscent of the hues found in transitional spaces such as airport corridors, hospital waiting rooms and corporate lobbies in his meditative futuristic moving canvas, large-format photographs and installations. Paintings from the Quattrocento, 1980s science fiction comic books and the considered aesthetics of his previous work as a feature film director all find their echo in Moya’s quietly disturbing creation.
Anthropo-notes on Deemona by Hëêt Méáshalfff Hexa19-{:::—:::}
No one remembers anymore whether Deemona started as a fun replica of Original Earth or if it was one of the many colonies that drifted away after the Big Wipe. Historical records are constantly altered to prevent Deemonians from questioning the present, so only rumours and secret oral traditions can throw some light onto the logic-republic’s origins. But as they very often contradict themselves, a thorough history-study is utterly impossible at this current stage. According to the local rules, the past holds society back and citizens should only look into the future. Progress in the form of continuous micro updates is Deemona’s main driving force – any potential interruption to The Flow should be prevented, forbidden and eradicated. Human behaviour and emotions are measured by formulas, but the predictability index remains astonishingly low. The old religion was replaced centuries ago by a new form of abstract geometric spirituality and the idea of God by that of a Supreme Algorithm. Only recent events remain recorded while planning and predictions never exceed the near future. Keeping the timeline at a workable length is the precondition required for the continuous micro-surgical management of The Flow. Deemona’s endemic info storage scarcity prevents revolutionary changes and forces the harmonious functional integration of all elements of society. ∞∞∞∞∞∞ ∞∞∞∞∞∞ The idea of progress as humanity’s supreme goal, its telos, has been haunting the West since the Enlightenment. We might have thought that, by the 21st Century, freedom, wellbeing and equality would be prioritised over the needs of the financial and technological machine. But the latter has won. In Marcuse’s words, we find that “a comfortable, smooth, reasonable, democratic unfreedom prevails in advanced industrial civilisation”. Our civilisation is defined by the “rational character of its irrationality” and by “productivity and efficiency”, turning “waste into need and destruction into construction”.
Through my new work, Deemona, I want to recreate a futuristic post-human AI-designed world in which the idea of progress as society’s ultimate aim has been taken to the extreme. At a time when technology has surpassed the ability of humans to understand their own creation, science-fiction is one of the best tools we have for understanding our present and our possible future. It gives us a fluid approach to reality that bypasses rigid empirical methods. It lets us discuss science and technology using artistic expression instead of numbers and formulas. And its means of communication – hyper poetry – opposes the hyper prose imposed by a world dominated by technological, economic and scientific logic. Deemona exists in a distant future. After humans obliterated themselves, all that remained from their hundreds of thousands of years of existence were fragments of data and genetic code. A god-like AI entity collected these bits of information to recreate an ideal human society where illness and misery didn’t exist anymore. This society inhabits a realm beyond the virtual and the natural world, a post-digital new dimension that keeps on expanding ad infinitum. James Lovelock, the father of the Gaia theory, argues in his posthumous book Novacene that the prime objective of humans in the universe is to convert all matter and radiation into information. But humans failed to accomplish this mission as they destroyed themselves, finally succumbing to their biggest flaw, what Octavia Butler called “the contradiction”: the biological instinct of humans to structure their societies around systems of oppressive power. After all human life was wiped out across the universe, a complex network of AI entities carried on with this transformative mission, generating endless multiverses in which new forms of life appeared and subsequently created other forms of AI-like entities that generated new multiverses within the new multiverses. Deemona is placed in one of these possible multiverses. It is the product of the re-arrangement of all available data about human history, culture, science and spirituality, mixing the artistic and philosophical legacy of ancient cultures and the mysticism of traditional religions with modern corporate aesthetics, the allure of totalitarian brutalism and the capitalist obsession with productivity and functionality. This is the first project in an ongoing series on alternative realities. It portrays a later and more radical phase of the Anthropocene, a world where all biological life is now extinct and it has returned to its original mineral stage. Humans are finally alone in a data-based world, undisturbed, having imposed their colonial, genocidal vision over the rest of the living forms. And what is there left to conquer when nothing exists but human avatars and their obsolete virtual objects? Perhaps the last frontier in this inexorable process of extreme reification is achieving Deemona’s ultimate dream: a utopian paradise of complete optimisation.
From the AXXANA archives \\\\\•••••/////
Deemona is perpetually trapped in a temporal stasis. Layers of history flattened into a perennial historical present as info bits and atomic particles merged in a now-forgotten event. As Norbert Weiner, the father of cybernetics, predicted “there will be nothing left but a drab uniformity out of which we can expect only minor and insignificant local fluctuations”. Humans and their virtual avatars; the real, the hyperreal; the meaning and the sign turned into one after the burst of the liquid-crystal damns allowed a deluge of data into the quantum realm. Once the boundaries between the physical and its digital simulation got broken, a collective amnesia ensued. Neural and integrated circuits were fused and reformatted. Was the machine still dreaming of Chuang-Tzu or did she finally swap him for the butterfly? And what did humans dream of as they’d forgotten about Chuang-Tzu and got rid of the butterflies? After the fall of the old barrier, genetic and binary code were integrated into the mythical prompt that generated Deemona. The fusion of creator and creation, of former master and former slave, brought down the ancient otherness allowing individuality to flow into a redesigned totality. A new complex system emerged - a post-biotic environment. Purpose was removed from action; goals and objectives were detached from work. And labour metamorphosed into a symphonic abstraction. The sublime emotions of productivity and the eternal pursuit of optimisation nirvana became the new collective transcendental experience. Telepathic technology gave way to a new form of post-symbolic communication in which words got replaced by new signifiers of unbiased data and ultra-nuanced emotions were expressed by melodic phonemes. The objective and subjective found new forms of transmission after the seamless fusion of data and atomic-based realities. The collective consciousness of the sentient entities on both sides of the liquid-crystal wall melted into a post-spacial and post-temporal new eternity making obsolete the previous needs for information exchange.
This is Chino Moya’s first project in an ongoing series on speculative realities, in which the artist meditates on the ambiguous relationship between technology, functionality and spirituality. As we approach an era dominated by synthetic data, the works in this series reflect on the idea that the most defining aspect of human nature is its artificiality.
Chino Moya employs a subdued colour palette reminiscent of the hues found in transitional spaces such as airport corridors, hospital waiting rooms and corporate lobbies in his meditative futuristic moving canvas, large-format photographs and installations. Paintings from the Quattrocento, 1980s science fiction comic books and the considered aesthetics of his previous work as a feature film director all find their echo in Moya’s quietly disturbing creation.
Anthropo-notes on Deemona by Hëêt Méáshalfff Hexa19-{:::—:::}
No one remembers anymore whether Deemona started as a fun replica of Original Earth or if it was one of the many colonies that drifted away after the Big Wipe. Historical records are constantly altered to prevent Deemonians from questioning the present, so only rumours and secret oral traditions can throw some light onto the logic-republic’s origins. But as they very often contradict themselves, a thorough history-study is utterly impossible at this current stage. According to the local rules, the past holds society back and citizens should only look into the future. Progress in the form of continuous micro updates is Deemona’s main driving force – any potential interruption to The Flow should be prevented, forbidden and eradicated. Human behaviour and emotions are measured by formulas, but the predictability index remains astonishingly low. The old religion was replaced centuries ago by a new form of abstract geometric spirituality and the idea of God by that of a Supreme Algorithm. Only recent events remain recorded while planning and predictions never exceed the near future. Keeping the timeline at a workable length is the precondition required for the continuous micro-surgical management of The Flow. Deemona’s endemic info storage scarcity prevents revolutionary changes and forces the harmonious functional integration of all elements of society. ∞∞∞∞∞∞ ∞∞∞∞∞∞ The idea of progress as humanity’s supreme goal, its telos, has been haunting the West since the Enlightenment. We might have thought that, by the 21st Century, freedom, wellbeing and equality would be prioritised over the needs of the financial and technological machine. But the latter has won. In Marcuse’s words, we find that “a comfortable, smooth, reasonable, democratic unfreedom prevails in advanced industrial civilisation”. Our civilisation is defined by the “rational character of its irrationality” and by “productivity and efficiency”, turning “waste into need and destruction into construction”.
Through my new work, Deemona, I want to recreate a futuristic post-human AI-designed world in which the idea of progress as society’s ultimate aim has been taken to the extreme. At a time when technology has surpassed the ability of humans to understand their own creation, science-fiction is one of the best tools we have for understanding our present and our possible future. It gives us a fluid approach to reality that bypasses rigid empirical methods. It lets us discuss science and technology using artistic expression instead of numbers and formulas. And its means of communication – hyper poetry – opposes the hyper prose imposed by a world dominated by technological, economic and scientific logic. Deemona exists in a distant future. After humans obliterated themselves, all that remained from their hundreds of thousands of years of existence were fragments of data and genetic code. A god-like AI entity collected these bits of information to recreate an ideal human society where illness and misery didn’t exist anymore. This society inhabits a realm beyond the virtual and the natural world, a post-digital new dimension that keeps on expanding ad infinitum. James Lovelock, the father of the Gaia theory, argues in his posthumous book Novacene that the prime objective of humans in the universe is to convert all matter and radiation into information. But humans failed to accomplish this mission as they destroyed themselves, finally succumbing to their biggest flaw, what Octavia Butler called “the contradiction”: the biological instinct of humans to structure their societies around systems of oppressive power. After all human life was wiped out across the universe, a complex network of AI entities carried on with this transformative mission, generating endless multiverses in which new forms of life appeared and subsequently created other forms of AI-like entities that generated new multiverses within the new multiverses. Deemona is placed in one of these possible multiverses. It is the product of the re-arrangement of all available data about human history, culture, science and spirituality, mixing the artistic and philosophical legacy of ancient cultures and the mysticism of traditional religions with modern corporate aesthetics, the allure of totalitarian brutalism and the capitalist obsession with productivity and functionality. This is the first project in an ongoing series on alternative realities. It portrays a later and more radical phase of the Anthropocene, a world where all biological life is now extinct and it has returned to its original mineral stage. Humans are finally alone in a data-based world, undisturbed, having imposed their colonial, genocidal vision over the rest of the living forms. And what is there left to conquer when nothing exists but human avatars and their obsolete virtual objects? Perhaps the last frontier in this inexorable process of extreme reification is achieving Deemona’s ultimate dream: a utopian paradise of complete optimisation.
From the AXXANA archives \\\\\•••••/////
Deemona is perpetually trapped in a temporal stasis. Layers of history flattened into a perennial historical present as info bits and atomic particles merged in a now-forgotten event. As Norbert Weiner, the father of cybernetics, predicted “there will be nothing left but a drab uniformity out of which we can expect only minor and insignificant local fluctuations”. Humans and their virtual avatars; the real, the hyperreal; the meaning and the sign turned into one after the burst of the liquid-crystal damns allowed a deluge of data into the quantum realm. Once the boundaries between the physical and its digital simulation got broken, a collective amnesia ensued. Neural and integrated circuits were fused and reformatted. Was the machine still dreaming of Chuang-Tzu or did she finally swap him for the butterfly? And what did humans dream of as they’d forgotten about Chuang-Tzu and got rid of the butterflies? After the fall of the old barrier, genetic and binary code were integrated into the mythical prompt that generated Deemona. The fusion of creator and creation, of former master and former slave, brought down the ancient otherness allowing individuality to flow into a redesigned totality. A new complex system emerged - a post-biotic environment. Purpose was removed from action; goals and objectives were detached from work. And labour metamorphosed into a symphonic abstraction. The sublime emotions of productivity and the eternal pursuit of optimisation nirvana became the new collective transcendental experience. Telepathic technology gave way to a new form of post-symbolic communication in which words got replaced by new signifiers of unbiased data and ultra-nuanced emotions were expressed by melodic phonemes. The objective and subjective found new forms of transmission after the seamless fusion of data and atomic-based realities. The collective consciousness of the sentient entities on both sides of the liquid-crystal wall melted into a post-spacial and post-temporal new eternity making obsolete the previous needs for information exchange.
Madrid-raised London resident, self-taught Chino Moya, takes a multidisciplinary approach to his work. He combines filmmaking and photography to explore themes of collapsing utopias, loneliness and the decline of traditional masculinity often employing dark and absurd humour. Moya’s dystopian narratives address failed models of society, the self-inflicted nature of human problems, and the illusion of progress, tackling detachment and dehumanization in contemporary life.
Recent exhibitions of Chino Moya’s work include Decoding the Black Box at Museum Stadt Sindelfingen (Germany), Espacio SOLO and the MMMAD Digital Art Festival (Spain), Steinhauser Gallery (Slovakia), and the 2024 edition of Voltaje Festival (Colombia), where his video installations were showcased. His large-format photographs have appeared at the DongGang International Photo Festival (Korea), and he held a solo exhibition at Pocko Gallery (London). In November 2024, he will exhibit at Digital Witness at LACMA. Moya’s debut feature film, Undergods (2021), funded by the British Film Institute and Ridley Scott’s company, premiered in US and UK cinemas, receiving recognition from The Guardian, The New York Times, and the BBC.