​In Dawn Chorus: Beta, Stine Deja’s newborn avatars sit in a circle, singing in chorus, celebrating their rebirth. Part machine, part human, part everyday commodity, the avatars conjure up one possibility of life after the cryogenic freezing. (A practice where human bodies are preserved at -196 degrees celcius after clinical death, in the hope that they may be brought back to life if/when science catches up.) As an exercise in speculative thinking, the installation explores the hope that resurrection may one day be possible – a hypothesis into which 400 cryogenically frozen people have already bought into. A meditation on the afterlife as a commodity and progress as faith, Deja questions the morality and ethics of resurrection and reproduction technologies, and the techno-solutionist fantasies of immortality.

The single-channel video (Dawn Chorus, 2021, 3’01’’) has been commissioned by the Goethe-Instituts East Asia for the media art project Hybrid by Nature. Further support provided by the Danish Arts Council.

Stine Deja is a Danish artist whose practice explores cybernetic and landscapes of fantasy and desire through 3D animation, immersive installation, and moving image. In her simulated spaces, uncanny avatars hinge between the strange and the familiar, seducing viewers with not-quite-real products informed by a simultaneous fascination with and revulsion at hyper-commercialised contemporary culture. Deja’s videos, sculptures, and installations disrupt and skew pre-existing attitudes and expectations, in order to think about the futures created through the relations between technology, anxiety, and desire. The artist received a BA in interaction design from Design School Kolding, and an MA from the Royal College of Art, London.