Bathybius Haeckelii

Bathybius Haeckelii is the genesis NFT by Mika Tajima, presented by Pace Verso, the web3 hub of Pace Gallery. The artwork is a visualization of New Humans (2019), in which emergent gatherings of synthetic humans rise from the surface of a black ferrofluid pool. Appearing to morph like a supernatural life form, these dynamic clusters of magnetic liquid produced by machine learning processes are images of communities of synthetic people — hybrid profiles modeled from actual DNA, fitness, and dating profile data sets sourced from public and leaked caches. The work questions the very nature of identity as something liquid, ever-evolving, and emerging, much like Bathybius Haeckelii, a substance that British biologist Thomas Henry Huxley discovered and initially believed to be a form of primordial matter, a source of all organic life.