The Laboratory

Image source: The Vital Machine, A study of Technology and Organic Life by David F. Channel, Oxford University Press, NY

The Creator's laboratory was inspired by De Viribus Electricitatis in Motu Musculari (1791) Luigi Galvani’s experimental apparatus and machines for the study of animal electricity.

The narrative occurs in a lugubrious laboratory, which resembles an alchemical dungeon/post-apocalyptic prison. The beakers and flasks, which we see in the background receive external "live" data streams and act as “time containers” and communication channels with a world that has been, is or could be. They represent both the Creator’s experiments in creature building and the raw material for his ongoing projects.

Inside the beakers and flasks that crowd the claustrophobic environment, float homunculus in various states of development and raw digital materials from which the Creator takes the elements for his creations. This “digital clay” becomes part of the DNA of the creatures and as such has unpredictable consequences once it is “released” into the world.

Some of these beakers and flasks act as “time containers” in that they show scenes of a world that has been, is or could be. As the digital bits and pieces of this data flow through the communicating vessels in the laboratory and recombine, some nightmarish visions appear projected through the frog-like creature and other specimens that hang in the background. They represent the Creator’s experiments in creature building. Occasionally, the creature’s muscles twitch, in a sort of digital-galvanic response to the influx of information, and excrete the contents into the surrounding area as processed media.


Galvani (1737–1798) was an Italian physician and physicist who lived and died in Bologna and who discovered that muscle and nerve cells produce electricity.
He coined the term animal electricity to describe whatever it was that activated the muscles of his specimens.
He regarded their activation as being generated by an electrical fluid that is carried to the muscles by the nerves. In the same manner, the electronic "fluid" flows through the network and feeds the Creator's mind.