So why am I doing this project?

First of all, I have a long-standing interest into how people relate to their environment, especially with what cannot be seen, but still has an impact on our world or our experiences.

During my previous two interactive projects, ‘Mutation’ (2003-4, 2007) and ‘Animal Lab’ (2005-6), I drew attention to the link between the desire for perfection and environmental degradation and the ability or inability to direct processes such as mutation. The idea for ‘Mutation’ came from looking at pallets of apples in a supermarket. All these apples looked the same: shiny, green, no blemishes – and, unfortunately, no taste. But what led to the ‘design’ of those apples? Was it food security? Or did the growers try to emulate what they thought consumers desired? And how was this uniform ideal achieved?

In the actual project, patterns of white shirts were symbolic of DNA. The made-up shirt was symbolic of ‘perfection’ of this DNA, but also of the desire for perfection. Participants were asked to express their relationship with perfection - whether in the general sense or in relation with DNA or the environment – by making ‘imperfect’ the shirt they are given to the degree they are comfortable with. The results of the project were a number of modified shirts with an equal number of interesting stories about how people perceive their relationship with the environment and with perfection.

Similarly, in the ‘Animal Lab’, people can playfully modify and make up patterns of toy animals with the help of a ‘mobile laboratory’, while engaging in conversation about genetic engineering. The project framework was designed to observe the interplay between the materials, symbolism and dialogue, but also to see how the outcome differed from that of other public GM debates.

During the ‘Animal Lab’, I also looked at reports from public engagement with nanotechnology and found that often the participants in those projects described engineered matter as ‘doing things’ contrarily to the intentions of the manufacturers. While that was usually dismissed as paranoia, fear of the unknown or superstition, I wondered if people do in fact perceive matter as not just something inert. I wanted to know, how everyone else imagined matter – in all its ‘incarnations’. What do people think goes on inside and between them and a wall or a table or the air that they breathe? Is the ‘mutable matter’ of new technologies part of a separate world, or is everything potentially mutable? Is the ‘infinitely small’ world of atoms and strange material behaviour removed not only in scale (atoms always seem to be ‘down there’ when people write about them) but from how we perceive our everyday environment? And why are people always kept from exploring this space that is deemed ‘too difficult’ or ‘too boring’? Mutable Matter is an attempt at communicating about this space and our relationship(s) with it.

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