Saya Woolfalk is an artist of African-American and Japanese descent who often explores themes of race, identity, technology, and science fiction in her work by creating multi-dimensional environments. Her latest project ChimaTEK Beta Launch features haunting digital projections alongside embellished figures.

“ChimaTEK Beta Launch” is the historic launch of ChimaTEK, a corporation owned by the Empathics. The Empathics are a fictional community of women I have been exploring for the past 7 years of my practice. The Empathics blend racial and ethnic identities as they transform, taking on characteristics of humans and plants. Through their non-profit research society, the Institute of Empathy, the Empathics study the condition of their hybridity and actively manipulate their genetic information. ChimaTEK’s patented technology makes Empathic interspecies and intersubjective hybridization available for purchase. The exhibition will demonstrate the corporation’s production and marketing techniques through a combination of digital and interactive video and sculpture. Saisha Grayson, assistant curator at the Brooklyn Museum’s Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, has helped generate the corporation’s advertising copy, which will be available at the exhibition and is excerpted below:

When used as a comprehensive system for self-transformation, ChimaTEK technologies offer clients access to a chimeric virtual existence. Users can choose, manipulate and enhance identity components and inhabit various combinations of cognitive, cultural consciousness mapping. Exploding physical limits, blurring psycho-cultural boundaries, ChimaTEK’s tools prepare individuals and organizations to more empathetically engage with the post-humanist, hybridized populace of our networked, globalized age.”

ChimaTEK Beta Launch is on view at Smack Mellon in Brooklyn, NY from September 27-November 9, 2014. For more information visit Smack Mellon online.

Images © SUPER.selected.