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ZOO OF CHIMERA
This work chooses five hybrids from myth in different continents, each embodying cultural meaning, focusing on deconstructing their body parts and recreating them into brand-new hybrids, attempting to discuss how mythological hybrids could represent human collective consciousness, and how coding could blend myth and biology into texts.
Concept
The development of technology expands human cognition and the relationship with the material world. The idea of “Chimera,” as the Greek mythological hybrid, keeps scientists exploring the future of gene editing; however, they are still balancing both technical and ethical challenges from all related experiments.
I use Python to make a speculative information board in the zoo to guide visitors. Every time the code runs, it takes visitors to the habitat of a hybrid baby and shows its features from two random mythological parent hybrids out of the five. The baby has a combination of its parents’ names, abilities, appearance, and personality. By reading the texts, visitors can imagine how it looks, and they can always see another one by regenerating the code, just like visiting the “real zoo”.
Here are four more examples from the random generation from my database:
Zoo of Chimera
Artist: Li Yi-Ho
Artist: Li Yi-Ho
2025