BIRTH SLEEVES? NEW EDITIONS: Launch Celebration

BIRTH SLEEVES? NEW EDITIONS

at Bermondsey Project Space

26 September - 7 October 2023

This September, award winning artist Jonathan Armour is returning to Bermondsey Project Space to exhibit his second solo show. Following on from Birth Sleeves? last October, the ‘New Editions’ build on the trans-humanist idea that one day we will be able to upload our human consciousness into a device which can then be relocated into a new body, whether naturally born, modified or artificially created.

Taken from Richard Morgan’s Altered Carbon, ‘sleeves’ are the term used for bodies that serve as a receptacle for the human consciousness. The body an individual is born with is called their Birth Sleeve. 


In the creation of this new exhibition, Armour has been influenced by Mark Jarzombek, Professor of the history and theory of architecture MIT, who said:

What develops over time is something like an ontological crust, a place where our traditional sense of identity toward the outside condenses and contains our sense of Self.

Our onto-crust hooks itself into the flesh of the digital, draining energy from it for its psychic purposes.*

Perhaps, we in 2023 would view the relationship between the onto-crust and the digital as more symbiotic? Armour postulates that we now approach the digital with a more critical, less naive/optimistic attitude than we did in 2016 when Jarzombek produced The Digital Stockholm Syndrome in the Post-Ontological Age, from which this excerpt is taken. 

Armour sees the skin as an interface between the person and the world around us.

 An underlying element to his works on silk is their fragility. We’re not used to seeing the human body fragmented in these ways. Pixels allow the accurate capturing of the skin surface, while also providing Armour with a base which he can play with and manipulate.



The exhibition will feature seven new ‘sleeve’ prints on silk, as well as a new body of digital works. 

*from “The Digital Stockholm Syndrome in the Post-Ontological Age”, by Mark Jarzombek, 2016, (University of Minnesota Press).