Tuesday, December 23, 2008

patricia piccinini mixes human and animal physiology


In case you didn't know her yet, Patricia Piccinini is an Australian conceptual artist who explores the fusion of the artificial and the natural, her idiom being cross-overs between the anthropomorphic and the zoomorphic. Her sculptures are so life-like that they immediately make you deem possible a future where humans can be genetically shaped into any desirable physiology.

A future that I am looking forward to, because I am plain bored with that ideal beauty image our one-dimensional culture is still clinging on to. I do understand that people do not know any better, but still I await the day where suddenly one human being decides to fund research labs so they can radically transform him or her beyond any recognition of the human form, and that it brings about a wave of followers. Imagine the benefits from having a completely different physiology and thus lived experience; flying, running faster, 360 degree vision, modular bodies, and doing breakdance in ways never imagined before are only the most obvious ideas. The reason we narrow-mindedly stick to our body is that we still treat it as a sexual object with a brain inside. The brain is what makes you smart, we hold, and what defines you professionally, while the body is what defines you socially. Our rationalist roots have so much left the body behind that it is still this open platform only meant to impress others on a social level. But we need to search for a true self, throw away our identification with our body, and start living in an embodied way, realizing that the development of what we call mind is intrinsically interwoven with that what we call body. And that the purpose of life is to find a holistic way of living in the present with the entire dynamical system that we control, continuously shaping an ideal vision as the only thing we identify with, and emanating this vision onto the world to give rise to a highly dynamic symphony of embodied interactions on the brink of evolutionary beauty.





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