ArchaeaBot in The Beauty of Early Life at ZKM
ยท exhibition
ArchaeaBot was included in The Beauty of Early Life at ZKM, placing the work within an exhibition shaped by deep time, early organisms, and the visual imagination of life's beginnings.
ArchaeaBot: A Post Climate Change, Post Singularity Life-form was included in The Beauty of Early Life at ZKM | Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe, where it was shown from 26 March to 10 July 2022. The exhibition brought together works shaped by questions of origin, evolution, and the visual and conceptual traces of the earliest forms of life.
That setting gave ArchaeaBot a strong context. The work imagines a life-form adapted to survival after climate collapse and technological transformation, drawing on archaea as some of the oldest and most resilient organisms on Earth. Shown within an exhibition concerned with early life, it connected speculative future biology back to deep evolutionary time.
For May, that tension between origin and aftermath is central. ArchaeaBot uses robotics, biomedia, and speculative design not to stage a fantasy of technological progress, but to ask what kinds of beings and systems might persist when human-centred assumptions no longer hold. At ZKM, those questions sat within a wider exhibition about how life begins, mutates, and continues to be imagined through science and culture.