Bart Hoste, Instinct Extinct

“Instinct extinct” is the fictional story about a future where nature’s struggle to survive brings forth some kind of technological hybrid. A clash exists between what’s artificially created by humans and the organic world that has always existed.

This story is seen through human eyes and embodies the idea of animals that develop the ability to think as men. A fish or any other given species obtains the same observatory skills as mankind.

They can see and feel like us, yet their perception is totally different. Fish have always lived in the water, birds in the sky and the trees. Their surroundings have made them evolve into animals with scales and feathers while we humans have clothes. Their wings and fins are their technology just like we have our cars and bikes. The only difference is that our technology is not inherent to our body. From an animal’s perception this is not clear though.

In this very distant future organic creatures are forced to develop their own kind of artificial world like we humans have done. But since they don’t understand how for man body and technology are two different things they do it in a completely different way.

When a fish in the water observes a human being in a car he might think that this is one whole, and not two different parts. To the fish the man in the car is actually a creature with a shell. When the animal (fish/bird/reptile) wants to compete with the human in his “car shell” it will become some kind of hybrid. Because it never understood that there were two separate elements. A morph between animal and technology exists, a new species is born.

This fictional future is being portrayed in a collection of 12 silhouettes where different aspects of the story are used. Sometimes in a very subtle way, sometimes rather anecdotal. To me the organic/animalistic part was more important from the beginning, so here and there it’s rather clear to observe animal-like shapes. Although a lot of my other shapes have also been based on the shape of certain car details.

My focus is on handicraft, which might seem rather ironical but to me this fits very well into the storyline. I tried to use a rather “organic” way of creating to make technology-inspired looking fabric samples. And the other way around, I tried to use artificial materials like plastic and glass to make organic-looking shapes. The architect Calatrava was one of my examples during the project, because of the way he uses repetition of bows and arrows to create complete futuristic, yet organic-looking buildings. It really was a great inspiration. After all it is a process we see in nature too, the repetition of shapes, which creates new shapes. It is the same with handiwork.

Another focus is, of course, the movement of things, since I didn’t just want to create wearable objects, I looked for a lot of materials that were rigid or simply very light and wavy and I juxtaposed them to each other. This way I hoped to create a very varied image on the runway.