This series of sculptures was made with the emerging technology of ceramic 3d printing and finished in one of the most ancient: a pit fire in the ground. Ritual Devices are part of the larger body of work Hybrid which examines the 10 millennia relationship between humans and pigs as a window into the technology of genetic engineering. Specifically it examines xenotransplantation, the effort to make pigs more genetically similar to humans for the purpose of organ transplantation.

While working on the film Hybrid I wanted to bring another layer to the story, to go beyond sharing a document of my research and to create a new ritual to memorialize the pigs whose lives are taken for xenotransplantation.

These ritual devices which you see produced in the film are modeled from a 3d scan of a bronze age sculpture of a wild boar. I 3d-printed this model in clay many times, and fired the sculptures in a pit fire, bringing together the most ancient of human technologies, pottery and fire, with a brand new fabrication technology.

In this sense they stand as metaphors for the whole project of xenotransplantation and the question I am asking:

Is CRISPR gene editing technology a rupture? Is it something radically new? Or is it a continuation of millennia old practices of domestication and selective breeding?