PETRA

Life was once believed to be created by God, but now it is understood to evolve through natural selection. However, in a world with highly advanced genome-editing technology, a third form of evolution may begin, in which human "preference" becomes the selective pressure. This work is a thought experiment that allows visitors, through the experience of creating their "ideal pet," to unconsciously become participants in an experiment of artificial selection. The visitors' aesthetic judgments are recorded and visualized as a collective phylogenetic tree. Your subjective sense of what is "cute" or "cool" will determine the shape of new life.

Visitors use a device housed in an arcade game cabinet to input text commands to a pet displayed on the screen (initially a simple mouse). In response to inputs such as "grow wings" or "change its pattern," an AI generates a new individual in real time. At the end, a receipt with a QR code is printed. Accessing the dedicated webpage via the QR code reveals a phylogenetic diagram of all the mutants the visitor has created, along with the true concept of the artwork. The choices of all visitors are accumulated, visualizing the entire picture of evolution as shaped by human preference.