Mutagenic Futures – Ken Rinaldo

We dwell in an era shadowed by the machinery of progress, where the unseen impacts of our industrialized world seep silently into our bodies. It is startling to find traces of plastic not only atop the windswept peaks of Mount Everest and in the abyssal darkness of the Marianas Trench but also woven into the very fabric of life within the placentas of mothers. Over a hundred thousand chemicals, including persistent substances like PFAS, pervade our everyday products. Yet, remarkably, our knowledge of their full toxic potential remains vastly incomplete, with substantial data existing for only a handful of these compounds.

Mutagenic futures sequence 2004 by Ken Rinaldo

These chemicals, many untested or inadequately studied under current conditions, have known links to endocrine disruption and mutagenic effects.

Through visual and poetic renderings, I attempt to illuminate the hidden consequences of our industrial choices—impacts on human health and beyond, reaching the very health of our planet and its non-human inhabitants.

One way we get much of the plastics and chemicals into our bodies are through our clothing and the act of drying your clothes in a cloths dryer, which emits millions of particles in a single dry cycle.

A poignant revelation lies in the estrogenic effects of plastics, derived from everyday items such clothing manufacture and use and birth control pills which now extend their influence beyond humanity to the ocean’s depths.

With birth control fish, subject to these synthetic estrogens, suffer feminization so severe that natural reproduction is disrupted.

Thinking about monoculture and the production of corn in our own country I think about all the toxic pesticides and their relationship ot the mechanisms of farming and how that places the machine into our digestive system.

This stark reality underscores the intricate and delicate web of life, now entangled with the byproducts of our industrial advancements. Visual art captures these silent invasions poignantly: sequences of images depict the ingestion and inhalation of microplastics through our most mundane activities, such as drying our clothes.

The discovery of a teratoma in the intestinal vista—a grotesque yet fascinating mutation—mirrors the hidden dangers lurking within our modern diets and environments, compounded by substances like glyphosate. This herbicide, prevalent in our monocultures, not only affects the plants it is meant to protect but slowly, steadily impairs our own health.

The washing machine is another machine and robot that introduces millions of plastic particles into our environment. Here we see it lodged into our digestive system.

As we race towards ever greater efficiencies, our technologies—designed to scale the production of food, fabricate synthetic garments, and accelerate every aspect of growth—often disregard the subtle, toxic legacies they leave behind.

These innovations, rapid and relentless, flood our ecosystems with pollutants, challenging the very cells of our bodies to adapt or perish. Corn and its monocultural production are prime examples.

Here we see a sSiamese twin being born of the mutagenic corn by Ken Rinaldo

Amidst this, the enduring irony of plastics haunts us: materials designed for fleeting use persist for millennia, outliving their utility as we pivot from fossil fuels to solar, yet leaving the petroleum industry scrambling to repurpose its residues.

Here is the lower tract of our digestive system being chocked off by plastic waste.

In the artistic tableau, a mutant infant emerges—not entirely human, corn, or machine, but an eerie hybrid, a symbol of our intertwined existence with the machinery that comforts yet confines us.

Another piece starkly portrays a pig birthing a human child—a surreal inversion reflecting our latest ventures into xenotransplantation, where engineered swine become potential bearers of new organs, replacing those ravaged by our own excesses. Recently, the boundary between fiction and reality blurs further as we contemplate using pigs as artificial wombs—a concept once fantastical, now frighteningly within reach.

As pigs are now being bred for growing human organs will the next stage be to use pigs as bioreactors to allow children to be incubated in their bodies? These world thinking surgeons think so.

In these reflections, art, and reality dance closely, mirroring our entanglements with the creations of our own ingenuity, urging us to ponder deeply the world we mold and its future inhabitants.

Exhibitions

CORFU CENTRAL PUBLIC HISTORICAL LIBRARY: CORFU TECH LAB Corfu, Greece, May 23-30, 2024
Mutagenic Futures with AI artworks by Ken Rinaldo and Adam Zaretsky Curated by Dalila Honorato

References