Synthetic
Monitoring
Devices
Research
//installation
2025
>> Rannamõisa, Tallinn. 02/2022
During winter 2022, I am in residence at the Nuku Theater in Tallinn. During long daily walks, I traverse a landscape where a boom in entrepreneurship linked to new technologies is spread out to meet the ruins of Soviet-era industrial complexes; on the edge of this space, vast military no-man’s-lands are being transformed into nature reserves along the Baltic Sea.
As I explore this geography, I think of Richard Brautigan’s poem “All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace,” written at the dawn of the computer revolution, at a time when people dreamed of humanity’s emancipation through technology. Later, it would become the title of a documentary series by the English filmmaker Adam Curtis, offering an interpretation of the history of the interaction between society and computers.
Sixty years after that poem, I wonder how these dreams of a harmonious interaction between machines and civilization have evolved.
I wonder if the technology used in a work of art can symbolically repair what it helps to disrupt in our hands, or if any such attempt will merely serve as yet another aesthetic anesthetic.
<⬤>
I like to think
(it has to be!)
of a cybernetic ecology
where we are free of our labors
and joined back to nature,
returned to our mammal
brothers and sisters,
and all watched over
by machines of loving grace.
— R.Brautigan
Synthetic Monitoring Organism
An oversized artificial device attempts to keep a fragment of an ecosystem alive through an unstable regulatory system. As the control mechanisms gradually break down, they create paradoxical conditions in which survival and destruction coexist.
Images of a prototype installation, presented at the exhibition Débordement, Le Sample, Bagnolet 2025.
Care / Control > The implication of the principle of surveillance within the act of care. When can protection become a form of constraint?
Dependence > A fragment of an ecosystem becomes dependent on the system that protects it.
Monitoring > Can an artificial organism succeed in caring for a living environment? Can it become identifiable through its limitations?
Living Conditions > Temperature, humidity, light, water circulation. What parameters allow an ecosystem to persist?
Artificial Organism > Designing a system that does not seek to replicate the appearance of living things, but rather to enter into a relationship with them.
Synthetic Monitoring Device
.
Research
// installation
2025
During winter 2022, I am in residence at the Nuku Theater in Tallinn. During long daily walks, I traverse a landscape where a boom in entrepreneurship linked to new technologies is spread out to meet the ruins of Soviet-era industrial complexes; on the edge of this space, vast military no-man’s-lands are being transformed into nature reserves along the Baltic Sea.
As I explore this geography, I think of Richard Brautigan’s poem “All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace,” written at the dawn of the computer revolution, at a time when people dreamed of humanity’s emancipation through technology. Later, it would become the title of a documentary series by the English filmmaker Adam Curtis, offering an interpretation of the history of the interaction between society and computers.
Sixty years after that poem, I wonder how these dreams of a harmonious interaction between machines and civilization have evolved.
I wonder if the technology used in a work of art can symbolically repair what it helps to disrupt in our hands, or if any such attempt will merely serve as yet another aesthetic anesthetic.
>> Rannamõisa, Tallinn. 02/2022
I like to think
(it has to be!)
of a cybernetic ecology
where we are free of our labors
and joined back to nature,
returned to our mammal
brothers and sisters,
and all watched over
by machines of loving grace.
— R.Brautigan
/Synthetic Monitoring Organism
Images of a prototype installation, presented at the exhibition Débordement, Le Sample, Bagnolet 2025.
An oversized artificial device attempts to keep a fragment of an ecosystem alive through an unstable regulatory system. As the control mechanisms gradually break down, they create paradoxical conditions in which survival and destruction coexist.
Care / Control > The implication of the principle of surveillance within the act of care. When can protection become a form of constraint?
Dependence > A fragment of an ecosystem becomes dependent on the system that protects it.
Monitoring > Can an artificial organism succeed in caring for a living environment? Can it become identifiable through its limitations?
Living conditions > Temperature, humidity, light, water circulation. What parameters allow an ecosystem to persist?
Artificial organism > Designing a system that does not seek to replicate the appearance of living things, but rather to enter into a relationship with them.
<⬤>