SAVING OURSELVES FROM OURSELVES

What’s this all about? Let’s forget the philosophy, the inner meaning and the intellectual properties that can be read into what’s being planned here, and boil it down to basics.

 

Above all else, this is an art project. Call it a deep sea installation, if you like, but whatever way you try to analyse it, the Deep Storage Project started out as an art project, and in the eyes of the artist behind it, that’s what it will always be.

 

Sometimes, the real meaning behind an idea or its original intentions can get lost in the fog of other peoples opinions. Yes, sure, the Deep Storage Project can be whatever people want it to be. Nobody’s going to argue with the free will of interpretation here, but it was an idea, a sketch, a prototype sculpt and then the real thing, so that’s still basically art.

 

In fact, one of the original thoughts was to try and find a way where people can become art. How can you make something like that work? Oh, there are numerous ideas, and there will be countless thoughts and theories in years to come, but for the moment the solution here was all down to a contract.

 

That’s the simplest way to explain it. Look, we all understand that the idea here is for volunteers to donate DNA samples, and that they’ll be stored inside the sculpture for maybe hundreds of thousands of years, but as I say, the point is that there’s a kind of unwritten contract between them and the artwork.

 

They have, in so many ways, become part of the artwork itself by participating. No matter what they see relating to the Deep Storage Project, from the smallest poster to the sculpt itself, they are part of it. An integral element, a component, a piece of the creative jigsaw, without them it would not add up to the sum of its parts.

 

In a sense, this is pushing the boundaries of what’s previously been accepted as creative participation outside an artists own particular circle.

 

The volunteers are not only investing their time and intelligence to agree to become a part of this, but they’re also literally giving a part of themselves to the idea, showing that they not only believe in the meaning of the project, but are also giving validity to discussing the vast potential of ways to try and save ourselves from ourselves.
 

Adrian Rigelsford is a London based writer