Mike Marcus, a 34 year old photographer and digital artist,will soon open his Exogeny #1 exhibition. “Exogeny” referring to the cultural practice of intentionally breeding outside of one’s cultural or ethnic community.

Each of his images displays a digital child compromised of synthetic derivatives from two portraits. Each facial feature is neither from one or the other but a digital “genetic” synthesis of the two.

In Mike’s own words:

“This is the world we now live in. A world where both the virtual and physical are becoming equally real. Where relationships between people do not depend on physical presence or even the ability to speak the same language. Where ideas and concepts exist outside of the brain of the individual in the collective mind of society where we call them memes. It is a world where a digital child is a serious prospect. If people can have cyber sex then why not cyber offspring?”

Yaniv Golan, a social networking expert and one of Yedda’s founders says:

“The concept of digital children is intriguing to us social-network-web-folks. Here is a different, albeit somewhat technical way to look at it: In a world where a lot of our interactions are online, where new relationships are formed in online social networks, where people create avatars and spend their life online in Second Life – it makes a lot of sense to explore the concept of digital children as yet another way to express my online life. Will people living virtual life and making virtual friends want to deepen the relationship and have a digital child with one of their digital friends? ….In fact, I could even imagine a service that lets two folks who have an online (and possibly also an offline) relationship submit their photos and ask the service to create a digital child for them, which they will then post on their profile as one further proof of their relationship.”

So what do you think? Do you see us evolving in this direction? How long will it be before we start living completely virtual lives? Will it all start with a new Facebook application that allows you to create digital children with your friends? And if such an application did come out, would you add it? You know you would…

Technorati tags: digital, photography, art, painting, exogeny, exhibition, digital children, breeding, virtual, yaniv golan, mike marcus, social networking, yedda, avatars, virtual world, second life, facebook

This entry was posted on Monday, July 23rd, 2007 at 9:00 pm and is filed under Web 2.0 Art. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.