Abiosis

Imagine back to your first ancestors. Infinitely great grandparents, so old and small, that you wouldn’t recognize them as family. They wouldn’t even be human. How did the first life on earth look? How did it act? What (Who?) was the first collection of matter to begin self-replicating? How do we even begin to define life’s origin?

As of today, we understand extremely little about the natural process by which life arose from non-living matter. Abiosis is an imaginative glimpse into this process, but also a demonstration of the viewer’s human flaws. Watching Abiosis is being six years old, watching a leaf fall into a stream and seeing where the current takes it. The leaf is just a dead thing being carried by wind and water, but we project our own thoughts and feelings. We turn the leaf’s journey into a story of adventure, triumph, and life.

Despite the journeys of these little creatures, they’re really just simple machines with no observable free will. They’re not sentient in the way we recognize sentience, so they’re not really alive. Motion creates the illusion of life.