Designing Life at The Natural History Museum: The Unnatural Selection by Shay Alkalay and Yael Mer

The Unnatural Selection by Shay Alkalay, Yael Mer and Oscar Narud, commissioned by Bloomberg as part of its Waste Not, Want It initiative, is a series of museum-style vitrines installed in the Darwin Centre at the Natural History Museum during the London Design Festival. 

Used computer monitors filled with animation cascade from the cabinets, mixing species and specimens in a most unnatural way. The hand drawn animation by Oscar Narud draws its inspiration from the Natural History Museum's collections.

The Natural History Museum's Darwin Centre becomes home to a tri-partite exhibition exploring designs on life from Antimatter, Arik Levy and  Shay Alkalay, Yael Mer and Oscar Narud.

For the first time the London Design Festival takes root at the Natural History Museum, neighbouring the V&A, with a three-year residency Designing Life, in which creatives interpret man’s involvement in and disruption of the natural selection process. Raw Edges exposes scientific research via a waterfall of moving cartoons on disused computer screens. Curator Suzanne Trocmé says: ‘It is not just the regeneration of man-made objects that has become relevant to our lives from an ecological standpoint, but the designing and regeneration of ourselves and nature.’ The Darwin Centre itself, inaugurated in 2009 and designed by Danish Architect C F Moller, is one of London’s finest contemporary builds.

Supported by Bloomberg