Are You There?

My work seeks to establish a dialogue involving humanity's relationship to technology and how this relationship might evolve as technology exponentially develops. The transhumanist movement believes that, through integrating with technology, humanity can radically improve the quality and length of life. This belief is taken a step further by post-humanists who believe that we might one day become indistinguishable from technology, transcending our bodies and exist as digital constructs. By distorting the human face, I seek to question how our individual and collective identities might be effected by the amalgamation of technology and question at what point (if ever) will we lose ourselves among the circuitry. Taking inspiration from Alan Warburton, I have attempted to incorporate my context as a digital artist, challenging and exploiting standardisations in production pipelines. This has recently involved me creating non-human humans, exploring the abject and uncanny valley, culminating in my work Are You There?. It is done by representing the individual as a set of data that has been captured and recreated by the camera and computer (respectively), using photogrammetry. By doing this, I am aligning myself in similar spaces to Phil Wang's This Person Does Not Exist and Heather Dewey-Hagborg's Stranger Visions. Through simulating this data set, this work directly links into the transhumanist and post-humanist movements, addressing themes of identity in the post-truth, digital age and questioning how an individual can be defined beyond their malleable data set. This simulation is then rendered using shaders which simulate a fleshy analogue, allowing light to enter the surface of the ‘skin’ and diffuse in a reddish colour, representing the blood vessels beneath the surface, creating an uncanny non-human human. Transhumanists believe that by controlling the development of technology we will be able to control our own evolution; if this is true, our discussions and decisions now may impact humanity for the rest of time. 

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