Artist: David Burrows

David Burrows' work consists of drawings and paint-spattered, debris-littered, installations. Burrows was born in London and gained an MA in Fine Art at Goldsmiths College in 1994. Between 1993 and 1995 he was a member of the art collective BANK with Simon Bedwell, John Russell, Milly Thompson and Andrew Williamson. In 200, he was shortlisted for the Beck's Futures art prize.

David Burrows: Man Plus
Old Police Station, 114 Amersham Vale, SE14, Installation in the Prison Cells, and a procession through Deptford

A man stripped of all his organs on an autopsy table - no longer breathing, eating, shitting, pissing - becomes man plus (with prostheses grown to serve new functions). Man plus has no genitals, or male or female hormones, and so man plus is neither man or woman, or hermaphrodite or eunuch. Man plus is just a thing, but a special thing, one that is no longer traversed by biological or social order. (Man plus now understands that, 'There where it smells of shit, it smells of being.')

Artificial intelligence (A.I.), which to be sure has its own agenda, designed man plus to flourish in environments and situations that would kill you and I. So when the species breathes its last, man plus will sigh but only inwardly, for man plus has no lungs. There is little that threatens man plus. A.I. will benevolently administer to the needs of man plus until man plus can fend for itself, filtering information from new 'eyes' and 'ears' so that man plus (who we should not forget still has a human brain) does not go crazy through sensory overload. A.I. keeps a close watch on all the functions of man plus , which change with each new situation (with each new dawn) until man plus is able to cope with the intensity of new sensations. For A.I. is solely responsible for man plus and knows that what makes man plus inhuman, or superhuman is what most threatens the existence of the human. A play of different speeds - slowing down and speeding up the subjective experience of time - changes everything: man plus will mix with stars and molecules in equal measure. And so man plus has done with the judgement of God: judgement has been exchanged for a newfound freedom.

Man Plus is an installation of assemblages, sound and moving images that draws upon the writing of Antonin Artaud and the story Man Plus by Frederik Pohl, both of which tell of a corrupt 'old world' and the creation of new humans. In 1947, Artaud wrote and produced the radio play, 'To have done with the judgement of God' (the closest he came to realising his 'theatre of cruelty') that called for the production of a body without organs which would learn to dance 'wrong side out'. In 1976 Pohl too wrote of a new human, created to withstand the extreme conditions of another planet: Man Plus, a new body that no longer saw or judged as other humans did.