Chris Joseph

The Boston Cyberarts Online Gallery have been kind enough to make me their current featured artist with my participatory video piece, ‘Eisenstein’s Monster’. The Boston Cyberarts Festival takes place from 20 April - 6 May at museums, galleries, theatres, universities, and public spaces in and around the Boston area.

Make your own video monsters - ‘Eisenstein’s Monster’ is a participatory video piece, a tongue-in-cheek coupling of Mary Shelley’s ‘Frankenstein’ and the montage theories of Sergei Eisenstein.

In the interactive version the participant is invited to create life with the press of a button, then shape and twist their creatures to their whim. Biological life is transformed through the digital (in this case, digital video and Flash) and back through choices of the biological user to become new biodigital lifeforms.

If user input is impossible or not desired, there is an ‘autoplay’ version where the computer plays God.

While the piece is intended to be light-hearted, our collective fear of science playing God lurks here, as it did in Shelley’s original.