The Ship of Theseus asks: if every plank of a ship is replaced, plank by plank, is it still the same ship? The ID and Ship of Theseus applies that thought experiment to how we perceive another person.

When we meet someone new, we start judging almost instantly — through environmental cues, social norms, stereotypes, the residue of everyone else we've ever known. What we see, increasingly, is an embodiment of our own expectations and projections. The "other" becomes a vessel assembled out of our own material.

So the question: once a person is completely overlaid with our presumptions, are we still seeing them — or a version of ourselves we've mistaken for them? And if it's the latter, where is the line between who they actually are and the exemplification we've drawn over them?

The piece stages this slow replacement as bio-art timelapse — cells dividing, forms dissolving and rebuilding — a continuous substitution that never announces when the original has been lost.

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