Let Us Make Man

God bringing Adam to life
In Rome I had the opportunity to spend a long time looking at Michelangelo’s fresco in the Sistine Chapel. In the middle of the ceiling, he painted God’s creation of Adam: God reaches out with his hand from a cloud to the naked Adam, the touch of God bringing Adam to life. It is the representation of the divine creation of man. Of course, we now know how things turned out. But a new question now arises: how will humanity continue to evolve?

Tension
The installation Let Us Make Man refers to the tension between the scientific theory of evolution and the creation story from Genesis 1. This Biblical story of the creation of the world and the subsequent fall of man has had great influence on the cultural, moral and political thinking of Western man.

New creator
The cases lay shiny but casually arranged on the floor, as if they were cases for musical instruments. From their shape, the viewer can recognize a familiar form: the two poses of the God and Adam from Michelangelo’s fresco. Adam is on the left and God is on the right. The case made to contain God with his outstretched hand is open. By developing self-learning computers, have we not created a new creator’s power that will soon exceed our own? Only the case for the flying God is open. The question is whether the new creator will be satisfied with this space.