Royal Scottish Academy - New Contemporaries 2022
Working with a range of media that provokes all senses - visual, auditory and olfaction - Rachy juxtaposes the natural environment with man-made worlds - fusing multi-sensory experiences with synthetic and evolutionary biology to form bio-fictional landscapes. Investigating the artificial and natural systems that question the contemporaneous and intimate relationships between nature, the body and technology and their co-existence within environmental disturbance. She confronts the confusion in the concept of identity and forces us to question where one organism stops and another begins.
Utilising bio-politics of the senses, Rachy challenges traditional approaches to the human sensorium, emphasising olfaction as well as microbial and embodied intelligence. Through her research and technological and sensual artistic exploration, Rachy is opening new discourse in the realms of cognition, artificial intelligence and machine learning, introducing concepts of the sensorial ecology of intelligence, the machine microbiome, machine ecosystems, and biological machines. Maintaining a practice focused on co-subjectivity, Rachy’s projects include collaborations with engineers, synthetic and microbiologists, computer scientists, perfumers, bacteria, fungus and lichens.
