Guilherme Gerais is a photographer from Brazil, currently doing a Master of Fine Arts Photography at the Royal School of Arts / KASK, Ghent - Belgium. The photographer has shown his work in festivals like Encontros da Imagem - Portugal, Fotografia Europea - Italy, Big Pictures/Cincinnati Art Museum - USA. His work has been published in GUP Magazine - The Netherlands, Der Greif - Germany,
Contact High Zine - Japan as well as in the publication 10x10 Photobooks in Latin America/USA.

Gerais' will launch his new project The Best of Mr. Chao this year at the photography festival BredaPhoto in the Netherlands. The "Robot Dog" and other selected works from this series Violet + Wilde are featured as a special edition. Please see "Robot Dog" in our section All Art.

On the series The Best of Mr. Chao

The Best of Mr. Chao aims to be a visual meditation on the future, dealing with invented situations, scientific discoveries at laboratories and universities, scenes of natural and artificial life, insects and microorganisms, robots and nest fragments. Through an interdisciplinary and non-linear narrative, the series gathers photographs on a certain scope: future, nature and technology or how we can perceive reality from the idea of a ‘Computable Universe’.

The intention is to show how these subjects meet and overlap in time and space, which are not determined in the series. This is because, often, the images appear to be from a distant past or part of an obsolete technology. Sometimes the images are shown within technological proposals that are still under development. And in other cases, they emerge from the imagination of the photographer about an idea of the “future”.

In this game about how technology looks at a certain time, the series also discusses how nature inspires man’s scientific progress. Through natural computation, experts have been using the ancestral knowledge, intelligence, organization, collective habits and the logic of swarms, with the objective of developing mechanisms that facilitate the daily life of human beings.

How a type of fungi named Slime Mold finds its food in the most accurate and efficient way have inspired many studies regarding how a ‘brainless’ organism can build networks as complex as the subway systems of a big city like Tokyo. Or how bumblebees, ants or cockroaches can be the inspiration for an algorithm, or the physical aspects of magnetic fields and spirals.

Central to these concepts is how these subjects meet and overlap in time and space, conflating the old with the new, the analogue with the digital, the obsolete with the cutting-edge (with an intentional dose of humor and improvisation).

Finally, The Best of Mr. Chao attempts “to reestablish our ties to non-human beings and to help us rediscover the playfulness and joy that can brighten the dark, strange loop we traverse”, as the philosopher Timothy Morton says.

Dog Robot I