Nemo Gould

Nemo Gould creates some brilliant kinetic sculptures using found objects:




This is one monkey I definitely wouldn't like to meet - just look at those teeth!





Check out more of his work at his website.

Lisa Black's Cyborg Animals

I've just discovered the sculptures of Lisa Black, where she combines the organic with the mechanical:









I think they're pretty damn cool.

Amber Case: We Are All Cyborgs Now

"It's not that machines are taking over, it's that they're helping us to be more human".

Patricia Piccinini - We Are Family

Patricia Piccinini's "We Are Family"

What if we someday got to the stage where we could make weird monsters - hybrids of two completely different animals? Would they have unique human qualities, such as reasoning and conscience? They would unlikely be able to lead a happy or normal life, as they share characteristics from two animals (in the case of Piccinini's sculpture, dog and human) yet they are neither and so would be shunned by both species; regarded as an abomination.

Questions

I have decided that the title for my project is going to be "Does technology make us more or less human?".

Within this topic I am going to be asking myself questions like:

- Do these sort of technological advancements (that may eventually allow us to evade, or at least slow down, certain processes such as death and disease) aid or hinder what makes us "human"? What about cyborgs - is there a point where they stop being human, or will they always be classed as human, no matter how much they have been modified?

- What are the potential dangers and benefits of these technological advancements?

- What impact will they have on the future of humanity?

- What defines us as human?

- Social networking plays a large role in our lives today; is it making us become recluses? Are we better off without it? (Admittedly these two questions stray from the transhumanist theme, but they still fit in with my question, so I feel they are still worth looking into).

If anyone has any thoughts or opinions on any of the questions, please feel free to comment. Your help is very much appreciated.

Previous work

I've decided to post some of the best pieces I have done so far on this course.



This was a piece I did on value. I was looking at ephemera and how it sells for a lot more if it is in good quality than if it's in poor quality. I took this matchbox and modified it to make it, and the matches inside, seem far more valuable, so that people will take better care of it. Each match is wrapped in tissue paper and has its own little tray within the box. There are two layers of these "trays" (much like how you get two layers inside a chocolate box).






For this project we each got given a typeface and an item we had to incorporate into our final piece. I got given Gill Sans and a clipboard. My piece is about the life of the creator of Gill Sans, Eric Gill. For those of you that don't know about him, he was basically a very messed up guy. Amongst other things, he had sex with his dog and this is what my piece is based on. On the clipboard clip (which is hidden under the paper, and so is supposed to represent the hidden, dark side of Gill's life) it reads "the bearded typographer jumps onto the lazy dog".






This is for my classification project where I had got given a topic (I got amphibians) and had to find a way to organise them. I eventually narrowed it down to just frogs and then picked six frogs that had odd abilities or characteristics (representing how diverse frogs are). I drew these frogs and wrote the facts down underneath. I then took two of my frog pages and turned them into posters. (If you're guessing that I was inspired by Mike Mignola for the drawings then you guessed correctly).

Then, last but not least, this is my animation I produced in the rotation period at the start of the year which people seemed to enjoy.

Hello.

I'm an art foundation student who is currently specialising in graphic design and this is my blog for my final major project, the topic of which is transhumanism. Here I'm just going to put my discoveries, my thoughts, my inspirations and sometimes some of the work I have done.

For my final major project I got to choose my own topic and I had a few favourite ideas out of the nine or so I wrote down, the three main ones being mysteries (the supernatural type, like cryptids, unexplained phenomena, UFOs and the like), robots (technological singularity, robots taking over the world, that sort of thing) and transhumanism, which was a last minute addition to my ideas. Admittedly, I did not know much about the subject this morning but I had heard the word a few times recently and decided to look it up and it seemed a perfect topic for a FMP. Luckily, my tutors also really liked it and so here I am, at the beginning of an epic 8 week project on transhumanism.

(Seeing as my project is on transhumanism, playing Deus Ex: Human Revolution totally counts as research).