BABY LOVE

Installation proposal by Shu Lea Cheang, 2005

Keywords:

genome | clone | artificial being

wireless | networked | distributed

memory | emotion |  data |

play |  playback | jam | jammed.

Concept | background ®¢ Locker Baby

The Locker Baby project conceives of 3 installation plans ‘ baby play’, ‘baby love’ and ‘baby work’. The first installment ‘baby play’  was commissioned and exhibited at NTT[ICC], Tokyo in 2001.

The Locker Baby project recalls Ryu Murakami’s noted novel Coin Locker Babies (1980) in which two boys abandoned at birth in one square foot metal boxes grew up haunted with the sound of human heart beats, those of their birth mothersÕ.   The updated version of locker baby proposes a fictional scenario set in year 2030. The DPT (DollyPolly Transgency) clones locker babies with  genes extracted from deep sea pearls harvested off Okinawa Island  Coin lockers situated in busy Tokyo train stations are the breeding grounds for Underworld test tube locker babies. The biobot locker babies are the clone generation of our scifi fantasia reality, entrusted to receive, store, transmit and negotiate human ‘memory’and ‘emotion’ Locker baby holds the key to unlock  a networked inter-sphere of ME (Memory-Emotion) data.

Concept | proposal - Baby Love

Baby Love  situates human and its baby clones in a perpetual spin of  fairground teacup ride.  Tea and sympathy,  love and ME-motion.  Love stories, love songs, transmitted  (via updated wireless  relay system) by the public are implanted as ME-data in the fabricated locker babies.  By taking a teacup ride with the babies, the ME-data are retrieved and played back. Revolt against mirrored self,  the clone babies reprocess the networked ME-data during the joy teacup ride. A gentle ride turned fast spin,  the data jam  nd jammed,  we are left to sort out the ME with the babies in storming teacups. The crash would eventually happens.

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