Issue link: https://cp.revolio.com/i/5219
79 www.hplusmagazine.com Australian-based artist Murray McKeich's work is less known. However, as a contributing illustrator for both 21C and World Art magazines in the 1990s, his work received critical attention in the States and Europe for its powerful evocation of the increasing intimacy between humans and technology. McKeich's digital images of this period involved the seamless blending and warping of industrial machinery and flesh, creating portraits of the cyborg and the posthuman at a time when the theorists were still arguing over what such terms meant. For McKeich photomontage was a kind of digital chemical reaction that generated the illusion of potential life-forms for which, as yet, we have no precedents, let alone names. Mixing memory and desire, McKeich's hybrid images are redolent of what George Santayana called the "suggestively monstrous," a grotesque evocation of what we have been and where we are going in the name of the human and posthuman. McKeich's p-zombie (2006-ongoing) takes the artist into new, time-based territory as he, like Stelarc, confronts the potential for intelligence to be manifest as animated agency. As with Prosthetic Head, p-zombie is an animated head that attempts to speak to the gallery visitor out of an indeterminate darkness. While it lacks any kind of autobiographical reference to its maker, it nonetheless appeals to us as an artificially-constructed life form making an entrance into our world. With both Prosthetic Head and p-zombie we witness the movement away from biological to pathological models of artificial intelligence. Prosthetic Head is a schizoid entity that at once describes itself as artificial agent as well as avatar of Stelarc himself. I first encountered it (him?) in 2004 in Melbourne and it seemed very conscious of my presence in the darkened gallery, hovering there in space like some iconic demigod. When it "woke up" to acknowledge me, its voice was granular, synthetic, yet at the same time disturbingly knowing, suggestive of a higher intelligence to come. last year I caught up with it again in Second life and it was lecturing on the theme of the "post-human". That's when I really started to get worried. Since that time, its appearance has audaciously morphed into the fourth dimension as a cubist-like countenance, described by the artist as a Faceted Head. Regarding this tranformation, Stelarc has observed that "the Prosthetic Head has not simply become the Faceted Head. It's certainly one that bypasses the purely representational and reanimates the face into a seductive and geometric structure." In other words, it is another revelation of its multiple self. Faceted Head has yet to be released on to an unsuspecting public. McKeich's p-zombie is a product of recent experiments in generative animation. The artist uses a simple algorithm that draws textural items from an archive, encodes a few simple rules for their combination and time-based software does the rest, generating potentially infinite variations on the theme of a talking head as a series of still images and a looped animation. McKeich's trademark style of visual alchemy evinces affinities with the Promethean myth and the Golem, mixing base elements such as street detritus, exotic fabrics, trinkets,