Osteoborg

Andrew Nelson’s fantastical drawings show us a distant future inhabited by living bone robots that are part-organic and part-machine.

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AN OSTEOBORG IS A SORT OF BONE-ROBOT, a truly surreal machine. The upper portion of this creature is an irregular mass of cubes composed of a bone-like material. The lower portion is a conglomeration of robot plant and animal parts.

This creature must have had machine ancestors but now is self-sustaining and integrated into its desert environment. The biological organisms that created the technologies that this life form now uses have been extinct for eons. If the landscape shown here is of a distant-future Earth, then it would appear that Gaia has taken what she needs from us for her great work of creation, and then washed us away with her great eraser, time.

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MY WORK INCLUDES DETAILED graphite drawings of waterscapes landscapes containing machine creatures, plant-animal hybrids and other conglomerations that might be found in the distant future or on other worlds.

Many of the landscapes are drawn from southwestern deserts waterscapes and mountains but others reflect a less Earthly aspect. Some of these drawings focus on post-technology ecosystems containing self-sustaining technological artefacts. What would feral technology do if it were left to its own devices to spawn and reproduce long after its biological creators had passed away, maybe millions of years in the future here on Earth or perhaps on some alien world with unclassifiable fusions of biology and machine?

My artwork explores the question of what autonomous machines would look like if they were to continue to evolve and integrate themselves into natural ecosystems over long periods of time. The work also seeks to find common underlying features that might be shared by all forms of complex life.

Art though the ages has explored unique nature of human experience. But is our uniqueness really our most important aspect? Maybe what makes us alive is more important than what makes us human. But are there commonalities among all possible forms of life? Perhaps something we feel and share at a fundamental level? When something catches your eye, does that mean you share affinity with it?

In addition to exploring shared aspects of all possible forms of life, my work is also aimed at creating images of objects or things that are un-named and unknown to the viewer. There is something visceral or fundamentally felt when one looks at a natural object with a complex structure, whether or not one knows what is being viewed.

For instance, a close-up image of a bone fragment or of a complex fungus is fascinating, somehow compelling to the eye, regardless of whether or not one knows what they are looking at.

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