CORPUS

CORPUS, Nancy Baker Cahill

Nancy Baker Cahill is a transdisciplinary artist known for using emerging technologies to explore how systemic power, the body, and technology intersect. In CORPUS, she responds to our rapidly changing relationship with biology and digital worlds by creating an impressive AR “symborg” - a blend of human, machine, plant life, lichen, microplastics, and microscopic organisms. This evolving, fluid form challenges our ideas about identity, bioengineering, and ecological interdependence.

In a time when technology, viruses, and synthetic beings are increasingly shaping our bodies, CORPUS imagines a future where all living organisms function as a single, interconnected body politic. The work questions fixed ideas of gender, anthrosupremacy, and the divide between the digital and physical, asking us to view the body as a process versus an object. In a world influenced by algorithms, CORPUS sparks important discussions about hybridity, connection, and the changing nature of our collective existence and entangled futures.

United States, 1:30 minutes, 2022-2024
Augmented Reality Film
No dialogue

About the artist

Nancy Baker Cahill

Nancy Baker Cahill is a transdisciplinary artist and expanded filmmaker whose hybrid practice focuses on systemic power, consciousness, and the human body through ecological thinking. She creates research-based immersive experiences, video installations, and conceptual projects rooted in drawing. Her monumental augmented reality (AR) artworks extend and subvert the lineage of land art, often highlighting civics and a desire for more equitable futures. She is the Founder and Artistic Director of 4^th Wall, a free, AR public art platform exploring site interventions and inclusive creative expression.

Credits

Production: Nancy Baker Cahill & Shaking Earth Digital
CORPUS was originally commissioned by The Berggruen Institute as part of the What Will Life Become? Symposium, 2022.