Arieh Frosh is an artist based in London and a graduate of Critical Practice at the Royal College of Art, London and the University of Oxford. He is interested in moments of collision between ecological thinking and computation, and plays these alongside classical sources of the biological, the monstrous, the anecdotal.

The work Ornithanthropon is a series of motorised sculptures of ‘harpies’ (which are mythical bird-woman hybrids). These harpies follow a programmed choreography, alongside miniature books that reflect on committee-led and probabilistic approaches to decision making. Through their motorised animation, the hybrid half-birds-half-people welcome the technological addition to their already mixed up selves, and become perplexing combinations of at least three halves.

These sculptures are part of an interdisciplinary project that uses the ‘harpy’ as character. It places harpies in opposition to their sinister historical misrepresentation, and instead takes them as referents to hybridity, communicating across species and genre.

Mostly working across animation, writing, sculpture and film, his practice often provides a brief entry into narrative networks. This is the case in the video projection The Gastro Optic Cable Company, a 3D animation of a fresco of creatures and objects that have grown on a wall, tangled together by bio-technical tubes. They survive on the energy from the tubes, which are both gastrointestinal tract and fibre optic cable.

The animation asks us how information spreads, and how it mixes with varied personal experiences. The digitised, living fresco acts as a possible future relic, as an extended digestive system. Drawn to the potentials of hybridity in contemporary thought, Arieh questions how such thinking relates to historical depictions of hybrids, and how these depictions might further evolve with the addition of machines.