The Future Of the Human Mind and Body

Immortality has been a driving force of technology for millennia -- from the pyramids of Giza to the architecture of Arakawa + Gins -- but this topic receives a fresh and provocative frame in “Transhuman Conditions.” Curated by Jeffry Cudlin, this exhibit of ten artists at the Arlington Arts Center confronts the issues of transhumanists: people who advocate for technological ways of enhancing human physical and intellectual capacity. Sound far-fetched? Consider the ways Facebook changes social relations or prosthetics that give injured soldiers returning from war the chance to live lives never before imagined.

Highlights of the exhibit include Brooklyn artist Shane Hope whose work ranges from digital prints – vibrant, complex and multifaceted – to “Compile-A-Child” drawings where he creates brief poems written by children in the years ahead – 2073 and 2081. One reads: “I Don’t want to Die / It is Really nice / to be Imortel / Wut a wast it was to die! / Neocytes keep me / Living and Lerning…” The intentional errors and scrawl of a 7 year old evoke a naïve wonder. Even the paper bears the familiar blue lines with a dashed center line of writing tablets from elementary school. Talking at the opening, Hope quoted a line of Marvin Minsky: “Will robots inherit the earth? Yes, but they will be our children.”

The architects Arakawa + Gins are represented by an information station of their books and photographs of projects, but not all the artists presented explore life everlasting. Some investigate the rarely considered: British filmmaker and performance artist Phillip Warnell swallowed an untethered endoscopic camera which traveled his gastro-intestinal tract taking pictures. The images look like views through a microscope during biology class, but it’s a slightly out-of-body experience to realize the dynamic designs are embedded within each of us. Cudlin writes in the exhibit’s catalogue: “Warnell seems to suggest that there is much that we still do not understand, and much that could be lost.”

The exhibit is exceptional, encompassing a spectrum of artists with thought-provoking perspectives. Saya Woolfalk’s works – video, drawings and paintings – shed light on how cultures construct specific images of the Other. As Cudlin writes: “Woolfalk seems to suggest that our ability to see difference, to empirically describe others without supplying our own narratives, may never keep pace with our evolution as a species.”

These works require sincere viewing, and the results are tantalizing and relevant.     

"Transhuman Conditions" opens tonight from 6 to 9 PM at the Arlington Arts Center, 3550 Wilson Boulevard.  The show runs January 29 through April 3, 2010.