Neocyberiada

Who told you that metal and robots cannot be tender and cannot love?

October 2018

Project leader, Designer, Makeup Artist, Image editor, Fundraiser Siranush

Neocyberiada Garments: 5 liters of Dragon Skin Silicone, biodegradable silver powder paint, silicon glue, edible foil, metal thread. Funded in part by Council for Arts at MIT Director’s Grant.

Come, let us hasten to a higher plane
Where dyads tread the fairy fields of Venn,
Their indices bedecked from one to n
Commingled in an endless Markov chain!

I'll grant thee random access to my heart,
Thou'lt tell me all the constants of thy love;
And so we two shall all love's lemmas prove,
And in our bound partition never part.

Cancel me not — for what then shall remain?
Abscissas some mantissas, modules, modes,
A root or two, a torus and a node:
The inverse of my verse, a null domain.

- Love and Tensor Algebra by Stanislaw Lem, Cyberiad

In my dream I saw the biological to be as rigid and precise as gears in a motor and the mechanical and metallic to be as soft and fluid and tender as a kiss of a flower. And I wondered, when we merge with the machines where does the human end and the machine start? Which parts of each other will we love?

“Suppose that which is taking place here and now is not reality, but only a tale, a tale of some higher order that contains within it the tale of the machine...”
― Stanisław Lem, The Cyberiad

Contributors

Design by Siranush Babakhanova

Modeled by Miffy Riley, Brennan Lee, Conor Kirby

Photographers Elahe Ahmadi, Garrett Souza, Valentine Edwards

Makeup and Styling by Ester Shmulyian, Erica Yuen, Liv Koslow, Siranush Babakhanova

Costumes by Siranush Babakhanova, Olivia Siegel, Talia Pelts

Special thanks to Maker Space in Media Lab, especially Graham Yaeger, as well as David Onymelykwe, Daniel Oran and Afika Nyati