My graduation project is an investigation into evolution, explored through prisms of biology, computation and a poetic personal narrative, shifting between timescales on an evolutionary timeline.

On a smaller timescale, I examined the idea of family as a microscopic fractal image within an evolutionary lineage. I place this idea in the present and recent past, by recreating the silhouette of my grandmother’s wedding dress as an artefact of my own family in an evolutionary timeline.

I connect this recent past to a distant future, by inserting the silhouette into a computational model I developed based on Conway’s “Game of Life”. The program transforms the shape into unexpected and abstract forms, taking inspiration from the tiny four-legged furry land creature that evolved into the modern whale, mapping out the fictional lineage that forms the basis of my collection.

Turing patterns; natural patterns such as stripes and spots, inspired the prints that are combined with the silhouettes, as morphogenic snapshots on an overarching evolutionary film roll.

During the fashionshow, the project was presented in a performance where the models represented snapshots of individuals in an evolutionary timeline. Centered in the space,  the audience whitnesses the birth of the last creature in the timeline, illuminated by a gridded spotlight that references the aforementioned gridded evolutionary computational model. As the creature learns how to take its first steps, one-by-one its ancestors trace paths weaving across the stage and through the audience.  
And finally, as it departs from its gridded island for the first time, the entire timeline unveils itself.  

Through this project, I invite you to take a moment to consider the beautiful complexities that connect life, including yourself.