SpaceBaby: Guinea Pigs Don't Dream is a 20-minute semi-fictional video journey into genetic space. It is the latest addition to London Fieldworks’ trilogy of installation and video works connecting myth and science, environmental cues and technological control, the virtual worlds we imagine and the real world we cannot escape. It mixes laboratory procedure with physical performance, CGI, narrative and sound. Human guinea pigs, fruit flies and lab rats are seen inhabiting a hallucinatory 24-hour world where night and day are interchangeable. Working with writer Ken Hollings and composer Dugal McKinnon, London Fieldworks artists Jo Joelson and Bruce Gilchrist have used documentary footage of the SpaceBaby performance, along with resulting data and footage shot around the capital. The narrative is played out in a world where everyone on earth appears to have fallen into a sleep-like trance: "Has the whole planet stopped moving or merely its inhabitants?"

The film was premiered at Whitechapel Art Gallery, 4 June 2008

FUNDERS & SPONSORS
The SpaceBaby performance and installation at Space Soon was funded by Arts Council England and supported by AHRC, University of Leicester, Affymetrix and Ambion

The Guinea Pigs Don't Dream video work was Funded by Arts & Business (New Partners Award), AHRC and Arts Council England and sponsored by Affymextrix, Ambion, with collaborative support from Department of Genetics at University of Leicester. Link to video extract >>