2005 Rockefeller New Media Foundation Proposal

Abstract

Personal Zoo is a collection of small fantastical creatures, figments of my imagination, which respond to the visitors of their clinical, lab-like zoo. At the first, their new forms, extra parts, and odd behaviors suggest that they emerge from current experiments in genetics. Yet while they are most likely not "alive", they do exhibit intelligent behavior, evoking an emotional response, a connection, to their visitors. As an earlier generation imagined and feared a brave new world in the thrall of a robotic superclass, the current generation does the same with the specter of genetics.