Flesh Nest is a nine-part sci-fi video series developed by filmmaker and video artist Andrew Thomas Huang. Originally conceived as a nine-channel video installation with looping video projections, the works together create an immersive techno-dystopian landscape. The Flesh Nest collection on Sedition features five of the nine chapters. The large scale installation premiers at Chromatic Festival in Montreal and as a single-channel screening at the Athens Digital Art Festival in May 2018.
With Flesh Nest, Huang illustrates a post-apocalyptic digital purgatory, each featuring cybernetic wastelands inhabited by zombie avatars, cyborg titans, null objects, scrambled matrices of digital detritus and tangled virtualscapes. This Inferno-like world is inspired in part by the apocalyptic panoramas of Bosch and Bruegel paintings, and also by the book Networks of New York by artist and writer Ingrid Burrington who documents the fragmented palimpsest of Internet infrastructure woven into our physical urban surroundings.
Created in collaboration with motion capture company Noitom, Flesh Nest features costumes by Ashley Eva Brock and choreography by Nina McNeely with performers and dancers Leo Morimune, Luz Remigio, Ryan Spencer and Kenzie McClure. Rather than presenting a digital world made up of the corporate sterility of server rooms, streaming sequences of 1s and 0s, or UI screengrabs, Flesh Nest is an attempt to represent our digital reality as it physically is: a fleshy, tangled, messy collision of human behaviour mapped and propagated via snaking cable lines across a decaying and irreversibly modified planet.
