Human Aquatic Breeding Centre

10 April - 18 May 2003
West end

Human Aquatic breeding centre depicts the ultimate cybernetic and digitised body of our times: Pamela Anderson. The project explores the extremes of human evolutionary discourse and finds its starting point in the modified and digitised body of Pamela Anderson and her character of CJ Parker from the TV series Baywatch, as a surf lifesaver and mutant amphibian. The work seeks to express the more mutant and monstrous body/technology discourse of digital culture through re-mediated sci-fi, schlock and trash culture. The project is as much about notions of celebrity and fanatical fandom as it is about the real and very fleshy world of the human body taken to extreme forms of customisation and transformation - along with the more surreal and lateral connections that can be made between technology, water, information, the web, evolution and ocean communication. The work is less about Pamela Anderson the person, but rather the science fiction concept of what Pamela Anderson represents as a pop cultural phenomenon. The object of Pamela Anderson's body as a web site attempts to foreground the nerd culture which defines so much of the internet experience, one which is often obviated in any reading of contemporary web culture, from dumb fan sites, web shrines and collector mailing lists. The web site utilises rudimentary and ugly html in Netscape 1.0 in an effort to intentionally remove the work from any kind of interface or design, which can typically overwhelm interactive work. The work is also a direct assault on slick IT design that permeates digital culture. Through it's aesthetic of crude html the project attempts to articulate the grassroots history of the web and the prehistory of the internet.