Art: “Beyond the genome: is machinery” (2016)

 (“Beyond the genome: is machinery (Adrian Glass 2016)”  17×24” Framed enhanced photographic image printed on Metallic Pearl – 255gsm)

Breaking down structure and architecture, removing systems to recreate formation is the predominant theme.  External and internal space is then reconfigured which also includes the microbiology.  It is without a doubt that the human race is entering into a new era with inter-connectivity and real time processioning via the Internet.  Now coined as “cognitive offloading” via utilizing electronic communication systems to store and access memory that is not kept within our own brains.  This, I suspect in an assisted evolutionary sense, is so that we can work faster and attempt to be more proficient.  However to remove and upgrade memory as an instinctive and cognitive purpose may take awhile to adjust, although adjustments may be occurring now.  An adaptation, as we become more connected to computer systems.  It is us that craft the machines, while we adapt to them as they in turn will craft us.    What does interest me, beyond the psychological aspects of transhumanism, is the biomechanics of the human anatomy, as the French poet Paul Valéry once noted “Man is only man at the surface. Remove the skin, dissect, and immediately you come to machinery”

In my 2016 novel Paradox of the Locus, the character Gabrielle Loren is a cyborg.  Not a new concept in science fiction, however I wanted to emphasize the psychological struggle one would have to accept if parts of your anatomy had been replaced by machinery.  The human movements and it’s dynamics assisted by automated machinery – in sense will have no neurobiological emotion.  Or has not learned or been able to imprint that anatomical ’emotion’.  In the millions of years of evolution, the human body is connected emotionally, aware of it’s biology.  But, despite critics of artificial intelligence and robotics, as Valéry simple observed, is that we are already machinery.  Updating and fusing with an cybernetic construct will only help us push the evolutionary scale into our favour.

 (Humani Victus Instrumenta: Ars Coquinaria Italian Master (Unknown) 1569.  Image is from the public domain)

 (The Machinery of Life David S. Goodsell 1992)