Myths: Archetypical Source of the Humankind

Myths are the essential basis of the various human cultures. They have existed in all civilizations along the course of history, from the most primitive ones – as most of the indigenous Brazilian nations – passing by the so called civilized cultures of the past, as the Greek and Egyptian civilizations, up to the modern western societies, in which mythical creatures still inhabit peoples' imagination and strongly contribute to the cultural identity of humanity.

Many myths represent what Jung called archetypes, the deep basis of the human culture, which has been already inserted into the core of the human species and now is being genetically forwarded. Some of these archetypes symbolize myths that are profoundly alike, even though they come up in different times and cultures, as the Greek myth mermaid, a beautiful, seducing and deadly creature from the sees, a “humanimal” hybrid, in which the body of a woman and a fish tail are combined and blend into one being. She has also a very similar “sister” that belongs to the indigenous and half-breed Brazilian culture, the so called Yara or Mãe D'Água, which also hypnotizes fishers with its beauty, eventually leading them to dive into the deep waters of the river towards death.

Many animal and man hybrid beings constitute part of the global mythical sources, as the Minotaur from Crete , the mythical elephant god Ganesh from the Hindu culture and also modern myths as the Sasquatch.

Mythological Chimaeras of the Contemporaneous Science

Advances in genetics have produced the first creatures that are hybrids of diverse species, they have created the first real chimeras. Transgenic beings have already become reality, and the future might turn out to be a world of hybrid humans, in which the design of immemorial myths will also become real, as I suggest in the fictional universe of the “Post-human Dawn”, and the technological advances of genetic engineering will allow the emergence of a new hybrid race by blending the most diverse animal and vegetable genes to the human ones.

The web art work “The Omega Myth“ is a website based on the concept of evolutionary design, defined by Christa Sommerer & Laurent Mignonneau, according to which the creature's design depends on the interaction of the users/visitors with their process of evolution.

The Website

You and Internet users from the whole world are invited to interact with a digital environment conceived by evolutionary algorithms. Firstly, it will mix your metaphorical "digital DNA” – obtained from the codification of your name or picture – to the digital DNA of one of 15 previously drawn mythological creatures (3 from each continent). The resulting unique creature will subsequently be inserted into an artificial life environment and there, it will be blended to other preexistent creatures in order to pass through a constant process of reproduction and evolution. According to Couchot, the work gathers two forms of interaction: the endogenous (interaction occurred among the virtual entities), and the exogenous (between the user and the digital world).

You will also be able to follow the creatures' evolution by observing the diverse generations in a diagram.

The Omega Myth is the metaphorical design of the synthesis creature made up from the blending of all global mythological creatures. It will be the ultimate creature generated in the artificial life environment, after a year exhibition of the web site.