Does mimicry represent the adjustment of life to its external circumstances in the name of survival? Or is mimicry productive of that environment itself, disturbing the very reality of nature, and within nature, disturbing what distinguishes weakness from might, the inanimate from the animate, and the fabricated from the merely existing? Why do the dramas unfolding in the animal kingdom figure in narratives human society conjures to insist upon the naturalness of its technologies of estrangement–now called technological ecosystems? And why do its techniques–“legal, political, religious, artistic or philosophic”–of inequality, inherited from the early days of the bourgeois epoch, still base themselves in the fictionalized motivations of Alexander Selkirk on the remote island of Más a Tierra, in 1704? On May 22, as part of the programming for Mimicry and the Monte Carlo Predator, artists Jeffrey Stuker and Lakshmi Luthra will lead a conversation addressing these and other questions surrounding mimicry, power, technology, and conceptions of Nature and the natural. Mimicry and the Monte Carlo Predator by Jeffrey Stuker is on view at Garden by appointment through June 8.