‘Deemona’ series
2022 - 2025
Chino Moya’s first project in an ongoing series on speculative realities, where the artist meditates on the ambiguous relationship between technology, functionality and spirituality. In ‘Deemona’ the idea of progress as society’s ultimate aim has been taken to the extreme and all biological life is now extinct, having returned to its original mineral stage. But in this optimised, über rational, functional and seemingly soulless data-based landscape, the fusion between man and machine has created a new form of algorithmic spirituality. As labour metamorphosed into a symphonic abstraction, the sublime emotions of productivity and the eternal pursuit of optimisation nirvana gave way to a new collective transcendental experience.
Chino Moya employs a subdued color palette reminiscent of the hues found in transitional spaces such as airport corridors, hospital waiting rooms and corporate lobbies in his meditative futuristic moving portraits, photographs and installations. Paintings from the Quattrocento, 1980s science fiction comic books and the considered aesthetics of his previous work as a feature film director all find their echo in Moya’s quietly disturbing creation.
To create his monumental high-end 4K video pieces, Chino Moya uses similar techniques to those in his feature films, employing an extensive team that includes camera and lighting crews, costume designers, prop makers, set builders, hair and makeup artists, 3D modelers, VFX compositors, sound designers, and musicians.
‘Deemona’ exists in a distant future where humans have obliterated themselves, succumbing to their biological instinct to structure societies around systems of oppressive power. All that remained from their hundreds of thousands of years of existence were fragments of data and genetic code. An AI demiurge collected these bits of information and created a harmonious, optimised human society where illness and suffering no longer existed. It flattened layers of history, culture, science, and spirituality to generate ‘Deemona’, a replica civilization that replaced the world that humans destroyed centuries ago. This neo-human configuration blends the artistic legacy of ancient cultures and the mysticism of traditional religions with the allure of totalitarian and modern corporate aesthetics, as well as the capitalist obsession with productivity and functionality.
‘Deemona’ inhabits a new kind of realm beyond the virtual and the natural world, a post-digital dimension that continues to expand ad infinitum. After all human life was wiped out across the universe, a complex network of AI entities carried on with humankind’s mission of converting radiation and matter into information, generating endless multiverses in which new forms of life appeared. These post-biological beings subsequently created other forms of AI-like entities that gave birth to new multiverses within the new multiverses, one of which is where ‘Deemona’ was created.
