Cyborg M4p1

Photo by azuaravaconmigo.

Two very transhumanist-themed trailers: Limitless and Captain America

Crystal Pite's Dark Matters [dance]

Canadian dancer/choreographer Crystal Pite's newest piece, Dark Matters, addresses some transhumanist themes, namely the creation of artificial progeny and its potentially grave and unpredictable implications. The title refers both to astrophysics and human impulses, exploring the idea of undetectable forces at work in cosmology and human affairs.


Dark Matters is a theatrical hybrid of puppetry and dance that opens as a sinister fable in which an inventor creates a puppet (or is that a robot?) with fateful results—and all expressed through contemporary ballet.

Cyborg professor implants "third eye" to back of his head

Via Singularity Hub:

Never question the resolve of an artist. First off, they are crazy enough to do anything. More importantly, some of them are secretly cyborgs. NYU Professor Wafaa Bilal announced his intent to install a camera on the back of his head earlier this season, and, true to his word, he is now walking around with the device surgically implanted. Bilal, an Iraq-born artist, has a history of controversial projects aimed at getting audiences to explore the limits and boundaries of society. Now, his backwards facing camera will stream the part of the world he never sees to visitors at the Mathaf Arab Museum of Modern Art in Qatar. The art project, entitled “The 3rd I” will go live on December 15th and continue for a year. Take a look at the cybernetic camera and listen to Bilal explain his work in the video from the Associated Press below. Two hours of surgery with nothing but local anesthesia – well, no one said becoming a cyborg (or an artist) was easy.

Check out Bilal's website.

Robots and cyborgs

Those of you who like robots will love this site: Concept Robots. And for those of you with a female cyborg fetish, check out this gallery.

Enter the virtual celebrity

Some mild futureshock for you:


Didn't William Gibson predict this?

Kenn Brown's latest piece

Feast your eyes on Kenn Brown's latest, what will be the final cover illustration for Jamil Moledina’s epic SciFi novel ‘Tearing the Sky’.

The art of Patrick Millard

Patrick Millard is Pittsburgh-based artist whose work in photography, new media, and sound has resulted in a diversified portfolio that addresses ideas about media, digital culture, technology and the interactions that human beings have within their own synthetic environment. His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally and continues to gain recognition.

In 2008, Patrick began to show his work inside the virtual simulation world Second Life; exhibitions that advance beyond two-dimension work and expand his ideas of simulation, virtual reality, and the synthetic future where the physical object gives way to its virtual counterpart and its presence is valued entirely for its idea rather than its place in space.

In 2009, shortly after becoming a regular exhibitor in the virtual environment, Patrick embarked upon his first photographic series that used the environment and society of Second Life as its subject matter and conceptual theme. Virtual Lens is an artistic and anthropological investigation into the life of the avatar, landscape of the sim environment, and experience of the virtual world. Patrick continues to photograph and exhibit his portfolios as well as spend time with fellow avatars in Second Life.

He currently works as Assistant Professor of Photography at Point Park University in Pittsburgh.

During the month of June, 2010 Patrick will be artist in residence at the Biosphere 2. During his time in residence he will be working on photographic, sound, and digital media portfolios.

Rae-Hunter's take on Inception

Casey Rae-Hunter of The Contrarian offers his take on Christoper Nolan's Inception. Rae-Hunter, who has guest blogged on Sentient Developments, is surprised that many of the technorati have neglected such themes as neurosecurity and mindfulness in their reviews of the film. He writes:

To me, the idea of establishing a defense against neural invaders is interesting, especially in light of new discoveries in neuroplasticity and the battle to maintain computer network security.
Fascinating stuff, but I’m pretty sure our psyches are less in danger of being harmed by outside forces than our own mental habits.

One of Nolan’s most original ideas is that the subconscious can be trained to act as a built-in police force during synaptic security breaches. The director seems to gravitate towards characters who exhibit tremendous martial/intellectual/transcendental discipline on the road to exceptionalism (Batman, The Prestige). This includes certain mental technologies.

Buddhism has for centuries been aware of the the mind’s plasticity. It teaches (among other things) that we can shape the function of our neural networks by observing our thoughts and establishing new patterns. In therapeutic psychology, this is called Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) — a remarkably effective treatment for a host of mental afflictions. Borrowing from Buddhism, it prescribes mindfulness as a method for rooting out “bad code” and establishing a healthier psyche.

Remapping the mind requires a great deal of discipline, but it can be done. Brains are far less rigid than stone, and even stone can be shaped by water. In this view, our thoughts are similar to ripples on a swift-moving river. Like thoughts, these ripples spontaneously and constantly appear and disappear. By not fixating on the origin of the ripples, but rather accepting the simple fact of their existence, we can begin to see the river as a whole and even influence its flow.

Inception takes a more martial approach to mindfulness, but it does offer hints as to how we can keep our shit together in the midst of chaos. In the film, one of the characters experiences acute panic when he realizes the reality he thought was solid is in fact quite the opposite. (We experience similar feelings of disassociation when someone close to us dies, we lose our job, get divorced, etc.) The character is told to focus on his breath and remember his training. The particulars of instruction aren’t revealed, but I’m guessing it involves meditation and mindfulness.

Rae-Hunter is absolutely right; Inception is a treasure trove of food-for-thought. Nolan's film should keep thinkers and writers busy for years to come.

Speaking of neurosecurity, it may someday be possible to create firewalls for the 'jacked-in' mind: Fighting back against mindhacks.

Latest piece: Singularity [art]

"Singularity"

The art of Fernando Vincente Anatomias

More about Fernando Vincente Anatomias here.

Via Grinding via imgfave.com.

The art of Shane Hope

There's an upcoming show that people in the New York area may be interested in:

Shane Hope: Your Mom Is Open Source
June 26 – August 1, 2009
Opening: Friday, June 26, 6-8 PM
Winkleman Gallery, 637 West 27th Street, New York

From the website:

Winkleman Gallery is very pleased to present “Your Mom Is Open Source,” our first solo exhibition by New York-based artist Shane Hope. In his latest suite of Molecular Modeling prints (“Mol Mods”) and “Compile-a-Child" drawings, Hope collapses possible futures like technoprogressive child's play. Foreseeable advances in neuro-, cyber-, gene-, and nano-technologies will likely snowball our transition into “posthumans,” beings whose basic capacities so radically exceed those of present humans as to be no longer unambiguously human by our current standards. Molecular manufacturing, artificial general intelligence, and life extension technologies may make possible the printing of printers, inventing inventors, as well as the expansion of ontological wiggle-room into and across novel substrates.

"Yes, but [grey goo] will be our children"

Asserting that art can provide key pictorial explorations into the ramifications of more precise manipulations of the smaller basic building blocks, Hope's "Mol Mods" playfully unravel the world at these scales by foreshadowing newly fantastical conflations of building and growing. Rendered and built with customized versions of user-sponsored open-source molecular visualization systems, these hyper-detailed monotypes anticipate their own actualization by way of nanofacture and picture junk sculptures, seashell crafts, among other molecularly doodled composited chimeras each developing from an embryonic stage; animals fashioned from flowchart cells woven into food webs connected by arrows that hitherto indicated the folds and twists of proteins; carbon nanotube moths flapping amidst balloon animal monkey molecules and less definitive evolutures with buckyballs in their eyes.

"Junk DNA"
More.

The art of Heidi Taillefer

Venus Envy
Heidi Taillefer is a Canadian artist living in Montreal. Her work is an original creative fusion of classical figurative painting, surrealism, contemporary realism and mythology combined with popular figurative traditions ranging from Victorian romanticism to science fiction. Her artwork is consonant with some early 20th century surrealists, such as Max Ernst and Giorgio DeChirco.

Introspection

Taillefer addresses eternal issues on the human condition borrowing from mythologies throughout different eras and cultures, through the lens and language of mechanism, mirroring the ubiquity of technological advancement in the world.

Hemoglobin
In her work she attempts to marry primordial human essence with the explosive expansion of the machine, as a new paradigm looms close on the horizon and promises a redefinition of what it means to be human.

Chimeric

You can find out more about Heidi Taillefer at her homepage.

Mondolithic Studios: Unraveling the mystery of DNA [image]

The Mondolithic boys put this together for Scientific American Magazine. This will go down as one of my favorites.

The art of Benedict Campbell

Benedict Campbell's homepage.

Mondolithic's cyborg Darwin sketch

Kenn Brown of Mondolithic Studios recently alerted me to this pre-production sketch of his for what will undoubtedly become a stunning painting:


This 'proof of concept' digital rendering takes a well known portrait of Charles Darwin and presents him as a synthesis of man and machine. Brown notes that it will likely go through a number of iterations before he commits it to canvas.

I'm very much looking forward to seeing where he takes it from here. Brown writes:

I was quite surprised that this concept had never been realized, and I scoured the net for several hours to ensure I was not duplicating another artists concept - and thankfully came up with nothing even close. It seems like an obvious solution given the growing emergence of transhumanist technologies and artificial inteligence augmentation, as an inevitable evolutionary step in human kind.

We really enjoy working out our paintings using digital technology and then taking it back into the analogue world for somthing a bit more permenant as an Oil on Canvas painting. It allows us to quickly realize a piece, and work out all of the elements like colour, composition - which lays down a solid foundation for creating a painting quickly and efficiently.

By the way, the concept was partly inspired by a recent illustration they did for the latest cover of Scientific American:

Hive of Dreams

New art by Kenn Brown.

Motherboard_7 (Sacred_Profane)

Art by Alicia Ross.

The art of Fred Harper

Fred Harper's website.

The art of Joachim Luetke

Joachim Luetke is a mixed media artist who is primarily known for his heavy metal album covers. His imagery is very dark, grim and completely dystopic.

The ObZen cover is interesting. The androgynous figure (the bottom half is female) conveys how modern man has found zen in the obscure and obscene.

Learn more about Joachim Luetke here.