around the world on the back of a spider

A giant spider, created by the theatrical engineers of "La Machine".

I wonder what happens if we hook this thing up to a neuromorphic chip.

peripetics

This animation is titled "Peripetics or The installation of an irreversible axis on a dynamic timeline" and was created by Zeitguised. A beautifully abstract expressive way to depict dynamic physical systems. Especially the breathing gestalt at the end of the movie is interesting to see. If together with our systems we can come to live in a harmonious symbiotic rhythm, we can truly come to feel one with them and surpass the alienation we feel in our current lifeworlds.

control your cosmos

The movie 'World Builder' by Bruce Branit truly shows a vision about how we could come to contruct our own world, therewith clearly reflecting the new title of this blog. I must say though that this is the typical future vision of human-computer interaction based on Cartesian conceptions of space mapped directly onto our bodily actions. It's the typical thinking that arises from people wanting to control their world, while I think it's much more beautiful if we learn to flow with the inherent unpredictability of it, so that it can guide us, help us transform, and become enlightened in the end, seeing that even if we do not feel in control, everything we do and choose to perceive is already an act of creation.

life inside a tumor

Medical animations never cease to be mind-bendingly stunning. Watch this a second time, and imagine what you see to be a posthuman city.

feminine control over nature

In a world that is still very much dictated by male dominance, it's nice to see a feminine version of this human value. I sort of like the feel of this, woman and nature becoming one, resulting in a transcendent transformation.

the alien within us

"If the individual cannot take the realness, aliveness, autonomy, and identity of himself and others for granted, then he has to become absorbed in contriving ways of trying to be real, of keeping himself or others alive, of preserving his identity, in efforts, as he will often put it, to prevent himself losing his self." R.D. Laing (1965), The Divided Self.

In a world where we finally realize that madness is just a convention, created by a society that itself can be characterized by lunacy, people will feel freed to morph their bodies according to their mental self-image. For your friday night transhumanist flavours, here's the Museum of the Mad, the Macabre, and the Marvelous, featuring some fictitious creatures blurring the boundaries between the fleshly and the mechanical:



"Sir Gustav von Cancertonus [...] has disassociated feelings towards humans and feels closer along side the crustacean family. He underwent an unorthodox procedure to correct his perceived shortcomings."



"The hoax [...]. A crude and tasteless look into the imagination of man, discovered in an Old Antique Shoppe where it was used as a conversation piece."



"Aerwig Mechanism. [...] An alkaline powered amalgamation of functioning pocket watch components, tar paper, and porcelain doll parts."



"Cupid papillon ansestrous. [...] The cupid fly was found in a small remote village stricken by disease. Some suggest flies laid eggs in the departed and genes were crossed resulting in a hybrid."

Before we have found an extra-terrestrial civilization, we will probably already have become the aliens we used to project outside of us.

living inside your own cortex

Immersion is redefining its limits with JoAnn Kuchera-Morin's Allosphere, a spherical room in which people can experience a three-dimensional simulation showing for example the inside of an atom, or an fMRI brain scan. Now this could be the start of us becoming nano-engineers, manipulating our own brain cells from the inside out by having our physical actions mediated to the nanorealm by anthropomorphic nanobots. We are becoming creators of our entire cosmos, space only being one of the first obvious dimensions in which we lose our experiential confinement to a certain configuration that more or less randomly emerged through evolutionary processes.

I'm also thinking that it would be interesting to see what would happen in the visual cortex if we are linked in real time to a visualization of it in our environment, so we could launch ourselves into a self-induced experiential infinity like a 21st century version of the Droste effect.