A tapeworm without a gut (sketches for disaster proto-fiction)
August 2017
Artist: Gary Zhexi Zhang
A tapeworm without a gut (sketches for disaster proto-fiction) features a series of research fragments and sketches for films. It explores Zhang’s interest in relations of parasitical exchange and the ideas of Michel Serres. Serres describes the parasite as the noise acting upon the signal - something that exists in apparent separation from an entity but nevertheless remodels its dynamic. In the ecological relationship, the parasite that appropriates the body of the host — the louse that replaces the tongue, the flatworm that imitates the gut — is also a principle of nurture and growth, and an augur of the possibility of new systems. Zhang’s current research explores the infiltration of this ecological imaginary into the sphere of technology: the agents which live intimately alongside and inside us, and the ways in which these systems infest, infect, interfere with and give birth to our own.
