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Design

This Digital Sculpture is Crawling with Simulated Life Forms

"Still Life with Yumyums" offers a peek into a world infested with digital organisms.
Screencap via

Remember the scene in Men in Black II where Tommy Lee Jones opens a locker and there's an entire species living inside? That's basically the situation in Theo Trian's new digital artwork, Still Life with Yumyums. A floating surface decked out with a hamster wheel, a giant banana, a phone, and a mysterious pile of ooze serves as the home of the Yumyums. Yumyums are a species of tiny, obnoxiously meowing digital creatures that, as Trian puts it, "eat, shit and rest, but their sole purpose in this miniature world is to reproduce and evolve."

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Throughout the eight-minute video, the Yumyums shuffle around, move stuff, and occasionally blow stuff up, yapping all the while. One imagines that, if there's a God, this is how she views our political debates.

While eight minutes seems like a long time to watch these strange creatures living their normal lives, it's just a small segment of a theoretically infinite simulaiton. Infinite, at least, "until the yumyums manage to escape the simulation," Trian notes. Cackle like a deity as you watch the full video below.

Check out more of Theo Trian's work on his website.

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