Baby 2.0 (2026) is a contemporary iteration of an original work created in the artists studio in 2008.
A trans-media interactive installation addressing our increasingly wired human condition, this work explores manipulation, technology, ethics, consumerism, and corporate power.
The 2026 edition rejects dystopian inevitability, instead embracing resistance, indeterminacy, and the manifestation of a better future.
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HUMAN EVOLUTION PROJECT
Created almost two decades ago as a vision of the near future, the original piece reads as a Cassandra like account of today: shaped by runaway tech, corporate and government chokeholds, social media, conspiracy culture, fraudulent health practices, and the rise of polygenic embryo screening. Baby 2.0 now asks people to consider:
-What if the things we most fear aren’t true?
-What if the privileged are the ones irreversibly trapped in the system?
-What if we embraced the most awkward parts of ourselves, and held the same compassion for others?
-What does cooperative play look like?
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INSTALLATION COMPONENTS EXPLAINED
Baby Monitors
Suspended and glowing, these “Baby Monitors” are composed of X-ray streams of fetuses, babies, and children, layered with “data flow” – the elements we are infusing into ourselves and future generations. Ranging from iconic political speeches to memes and mass media, and saturated with corporate logos and AI behavior graphs, the Baby Monitors offer a condensed sampling of the forces that bombard us daily.
The Hex Chamber:
Ominous, mysterious, sterile. The six-sided white chamber sits humming at the end of a row of Baby Monitors, accompanied by a corresponding status box. Could this be what lies at the other end of all those numbered boxes? A tiny peephole glows blue, offering potential answers.
The Bassinet
The interior of the Hex Chamber is visible only through a small hexagonal opening in its side. Inside, the glowing letters of a baby mobile hover in the darkness. Evocative of a GUI menu, words like “mother, father, self, love, fear, connect” rotate slowly, joined by “copy, undo, view, help, options, home, history.”
Looking more closely, beneath the mobile sits the Bassinet itself: a pristine white baby pram, softly illuminated from within. Through the white cloth, a small red light blinks -or is it a tiny heart beating?
Finally, from the underside of the Bassinet spills a rat’s nest of cables. Snaking outward in every direction, organic and grotesque, they form the chaotic underbelly of our technology-filled lives.
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NEW ELEMENTS
Control Kiosk
The 2026 edition updates the work for a more contemporary moment. As we confront the ethical concerns surrounding ML/AI, polygenic embryo screening, cryptocurrency, and cult-like programming via social media, there is much to engage with.
Data Flow
Projection inside the hex chamber and incorporated into the baby monitors. This is real-time data scraped from the internet. Possible sources include trending hashtags (ie memes), environmental metrics, stock exchange data, or social media discussion threads.
AI/ML
The most disruptive medium of our age, incorporated as a medium:
Use of local ML (i.e. https://www.metacreation.net/autolume) to simulate a baby’s attribute and success rate, appearance, personality.
Incorporated into the “baby editor” as storyteller.
BABY EDITOR
The original work had a rudimentary editor. This edition’s most defining feature is the Baby Editor, an interactive piece of speculative fiction.
Design and choose different attributes for a Future Person. (It may be a new body for yourself, it may be a new person, it might be for your Dad)
Each attribute costs credit, most participants will start with a tiny budget that makes it difficult to design an Übermench.
In the Editor, visitors can:
-Create a Commercial or Open Source human
-Sign up to be harvested (commercial) – a (performative, its art) opt-in to the system. Submit photos, answer quizzes, write a poem. Locked into one editing direction.
-Or share themselves (open source) – submit photos, answer quizzes, write a poem. Option to add noise to the signal.
-Receive an approved budget for their offspring/clone/self
-Play with the Baby Editor and design their own perfect human being (according to budget and other restrictions)
-Successfully hack/resist the system via empathy, collaborative play, organic choices. (underlying thesis / call to action)
If participants go commercial, and want to give their human more of a head start in life, they can supplement via commercially sponsored gene packages. For instance, a U.S. military package grants physical agility, the Prada one offers better bone structure or a fast metabolism.
Going Open Source:
Users pull shared attributes from previous visitors donations (one person’s eyes, another person’s answers on a questionnaire (i.e memory, dream, or imagined story)
Designed humans are displayed across baby monitors.
Some results of commercial:
-Far more generic/restrictive
-Fun but often broken
-Results in anomalies
-A cannibalistic dead end (limited content)
Some results of open source:
-Bigger possibility space
-Fun,Wild Card results
-Results in stability
-Sustainable (no budget, cross pollination)