Tuesday, March 18, 2008

In thinking about the practicality of ordinary, everyday objects like chairs, I thought about H.R. Giger and how he looked at and reinvented ordinary objects based on how an alien might use an an object such as a chair in his initial designs for the Alien motion picture series.

I like this quote from his work "Biomechanics" (1993) "Flesh and bone join magma and steel  in synergistic ballet. Metal girders support and conduits nourish. Human forms grow fluid and metamorphic, evolving into a new realm, both disturbing and sublime." H.R. Giger

I find it interesting that more and more humans are becoming "augmented" and or "improved" as our technological abilities improve. Soon, I believe the bridge will become even more seamless just as Giger has envisioned it. Reality following art or is art manifesting reality?

1 comment:

Bekah Jarvis said...

Art often precedes physical innovation. I think it is in the very act of dreaming, or having a finger on the collective dreams of the world that often leads artists, writers, etc. to make the seemingly prophetic work they do. Artists innovate the ideas and present them, making them easier to digest. They make ideas firm. And then those with the know-how eventually come along, and the framework gets filled in, as science catches up to previous dreams and flounders in the face of the new ones.

As for this biomechanical direction we may well be taking, I think it is entirely possible that this will be come more and more prevalent if we continue to medicalize the world in our pursuit of immortality and youth. Unfortunately (or maybe not, if you believe as I do that there is a certain inherent order to things, and a certain level of sustainability that we are already violating), I don’t know if we will realize these dreams prior to grinding ourselves into oblivion. Nature’s gonna pop us one any second and we deserve it. If the Earth can’t sustain us as is, I wonder how it’s going to be if we manage to design super-humans with replaceable parts.

Thank goodness grey matter only lasts so long…