TABLE OF CONTENTS

05 Foreword : Claire Huschle

06 Transhuman Conditions : Jeffry Cudlin

18 The Art of Staying Human : Joel Garreau

27 Suggested Reading

TRANSHUMAN CONDITIONS
Arakawa & Gins 06

CarianaCarianne 08

Laure Drogoul 10

Shane Hope 12

Jason Horowitz 14

Ivan Lozano 16

Shana Moulton 18

Geoffrey Alan Rhodes 20

Phillip Warnell 22

Saya Woolfalk 24
 FOREWORD

One of the tenets that Jeffry and I use as a guiding

principle in presenting exhibitions here at the AAC is
that the work must reveal how contemporary art reflects
contemporary life. I admit, when Jeffry approached me
with the idea for Transhuman Conditions, I thought, “what
can this possibly have to do with everyday life?” The
concept was more the stuff of science fiction novels I had
read years ago than of anything having to do with the
present world around me.

And then I got to thinking. I have “friends” on Facebook

that I have never met in person. My running magazines
regularly profile the very average lives of non-professional
athletes who use high-tech prosthetics to run in their
local Turkey Trot 5Ks. The husband of a friend builds
optical security technology that can call up whole
individual identities in the blink—literally—of an eye. I
even listened not long ago to a serious conversation on
contemporary theology, in which “god” was understood
not as an anthropomorphic being, but rather as a web—
TRANSHUMAN CONDITIONS infinite and all-encompassing, much like, well, like a more
recent system for ordering human reality: the Internet.

In fact, the condition of transhumanism—the shifting

away from a purely corporal understanding of our human
identity—is very real, and very present in our everyday
lives. The artists in this exhibition understand and
explore this. They ask us to consider the meaning of the
technological advances that have slipped into our lives,
often unnoticed, and are helping to redefine who we are.

Transhuman Conditions would not have been possible

without generous foundation support. In particular, I
thank the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts
and Altria Group, Inc., both deeply committed to the
advancement of contemporary culture. I also wish to
express our thanks to Joel Garreau for his informative and
engaging essay, which reminds us that it is not just artists
thinking about a new reality. The artists, of course, need
to be applauded for their compelling work. Finally, I have
to thank our own Director of Exhibitions, Jeffry Cudlin,
whose vision is simultaneously intellectually stimulating
and fundamentally down-to-earth.

Claire Huschle
Executive Director

05
TRANSHUMAN CONDITIONS
Jeffry Cudlin

Transhuman Conditions features ten artists thinking about

the future of the human body. The works these artists
create might seem humorous, visceral, or even outlandish,
but they all raise serious questions about the next phase
in human evolution—a phase that very likely will be
self-directed. Mind you, these artists are not necessarily
cyborg-obsessed millenarians. They attempt to
deconstruct and reconfigure physical bodies for a variety
of reasons: from meditating on the relationship between
mind and embodiment; to considering gender, sexuality,
and the construction of identity; to using an imaginary
future as a means to critique the past. In other words,
whether or not you expect to download the contents of
your brain to a computer anytime soon, the artworks in
this show can speak to your experiences in the world.
What does it mean to be transhuman? Transhumanism
has existed as an idea at least since the 1950s, and as
an organized cultural movement since the 1980s. A
transhumanist is someone who actively seeks out and
advocates for scientific and technological methods for
enhancing human physical and intellectual capacity.
Think of transhumanists as early adopters—except
instead of being the first kid on the block ready to own
an iPhone, wear a Bluetooth device, or open a Facebook
account, a transhumanist is gearing up for radical gene
therapies, brain-machine interfaces, or cutting-edge
prosthetic enhancements.
As far as transhumanist artists go, the most visible
practitioners have often pursued extreme body
modification as performance. Take Orlan, the French artist
who, through a series of plastic surgeries in the 1990s
involving odd brow ridges, chin implants, and other
For four decades, New York architects Arakawa and Gins
have worked to devise architectural procedures capable
of retraining human bodies to live longer. The couple
works across disciplines—architecture, philosophy,
printmaking, poetry, science—and has developed a
sophisticated, utterly unusual syntax for each.
Routine for Arakawa and Gins is not just dull; it’s
unhealthy. Sites that lull the body into comfort and
complacency can slowly kill us. Dynamism, constant
thought, and constant receptiveness to change are the
keys to maintaining a healthy organism. Accordingly,
Arakawa and Gins design sites in which the body
is constantly thrown off-balance, forced to process
contrary systems of visual information, and unable to
take the flatness of the floor or even the privacy afforded
by doorways for granted.
The couple defines a human as “an organism
that persons,” i.e., a biological body engaged in a
discontinuous, moment-to-moment process of creating
and presenting an identity. Further, organisms perceive
and respond to the world via their entire nervous system,
so acts of intellection occur body-wide. Architecture,
then, should constantly engage the entire body to keep
humans intent on locating themselves and constructing
themselves and their world. Ultimately, the belief that
changing behavior in this way could alter our biological
destiny might sound utopian or fantastic, but the vivid
imagery and complex language they employ make a
fascinating case for immortality through architecture.
Opposite, top to bottom:
Elliptical Field, Site of Reversible Destiny–Yoro Park, Gifu
Prefecture, Japan. 1995. Arakawa and Gins.
Reversible Destiny Lofts–Mitaka, Kitchen and Sphere Room.
2006. Photo: Noboru Inoue.
Ubiquitious Site–Nagi’s Ryoanji–Architectural Body. 1994.
Arakawa and Gins.
Bioscleave House, Life Span Extending Villa, Interior Living Area,
Kitchen, Bedroom, Bathroom. 2008. Photo: José Luis Perez-Griffo
Viqueira.
Above:
Bird’s eye view of Elliptical Field, Site of Reversible Destiny–Yoro
Park, Gifu Prefecture, Japan. 1995. Arakawa and Gins.

07
radical alterations, attempted to change her appearance
to match that of various canonical Western works of art.
Also tied closely to the movement is Stelarc, an Australian
artist who regards the human body as obsolete, and
has attempted to modify his own flesh with electrodes,
prostheses, and artificial organs—including, most
infamously, a third ear sewn into his left forearm.

While both artists have certainly explored serious subject

matter, the sensational aspects of their practices have
tended to dominate perceptions of their work, leaving
them stranded on the fringes of contemporary art
discourse. Similarly, transhumanists are often stereotyped
as people living in an alternate reality: a science fiction
fantasy world in which difficult ethical and practical
considerations are ignored in favor of generally being
bullish on the future. Add to this the bad habit of those
ready to live in Tomorrowland to over-promise. Take
transhumanist author Ray Kurzweil, who, despite his
uncanny ability to track and project developments in
the field of information technology, often forecasts
imminent breakthroughs in medicine that few medical
professionals would take seriously—like, for example, his
prediction that the majority of fatal diseases afflicting
the industrialized world will be vanquished by 2019.
Accordingly, it’s often joked that transhumanists prefer
to predict that death will be defeated within their own
lifetimes—not after they’re gone.

But these sorts of associations can obscure the vitality of

the debate about core transhumanist issues, and distract
from the realization that this debate no longer exists on
the margins of contemporary life, but very much in the
mainstream. The future has finally caught up with us.

Today, amputee runners are barred from competition

because their prosthetic legs are declared unfair
advantages, not hindrances. Websites exist that maintain
a person’s e-mail correspondence and web presence
after death. People meet, befriend one another, and
date over long distances via social networking platforms.
And waiting in the wings are very real breakthroughs in
nanotechnology, genetics, and robotics that promise—or
threaten—to turn us into a new organism altogether:
what biotech entrepreneur Juan Enriquez refers to
as Homo Evolutis. This is why our catalogue includes
the popular science overview written by author and
Washington Post senior writer Joel Garreau, who has a
knack for presenting such far-reaching developments in
concise, measured, and accessible terms.
These developments serve as this show’s jumping
off point. But the underlying aim, as with all AAC
Chicago artist CarianaCarianne is redesigning herself in
a very real, legally binding sense: Her ongoing project
is to have herself redefined as two people sharing one
body. Through subversive real-world actions involving
intellectual property laws, social contracts, and even
university diplomas—the artist received two different
MFAs under two different names simultaneously—
CarianaCarianne has transformed herself into a different
category of human organism.
For Drawing and Being Drawn, the artist attempted
to design various components for an augmented human
body. From devices to enhance an individual’s abilities to
see, hear, and speak, to theoretical surgical procedures
for the creation of a conjoined life form, the artist lays
the groundwork for a new human species. By patenting
these ideas, the artist prepares for not only their legal
recognition, but also their eventual return to the public
domain in an officially recognized way.
CarianaCarianne’s project pushes the boundaries
of self-determination. Further, she seems to forecast
coming debates on the redefinition of personhood in
the face of successive waves of artificial enhancement
and augmentation of the human body. In the face of
this work, the question of what is or isn’t meaningful
in defining our humanity—and who or what should
receive the rights and protections accorded to humans—
becomes difficult to untangle.
Opposite and above:
Drawing and Being Drawn. 2007–8. installation and components
from the mixed media installation.

08 09
exhibitions programming, is to bring home to a general
audience the power of contemporary art to help us
define and understand issues of the present moment.
Contemporary art can appear unfamiliar, challenging, or
transgressive—but the good stuff is inevitably fearless,
engaged, and topical, no matter how hallucinatory or
hyperreal the imagery it deploys. In the presence of works
of contemporary art, conversations happen that can’t
unfold the same way, with the same speculative ferocity,
anywhere else in public life.This type of art asks us to
consider how we should participate not just in a discourse
about aesthetics or culture, but in the day-to-day business
of living.
Transhuman Conditions, then, is as much about the power
of contemporary art to reveal our own situation to us as it
is about any specific futurist scenario. The roster of artists
presented here engage in a diverse array of practices, and
operate from a variety of ideological baselines. In fact,
despite the obvious reference in the show’s title, there are
likely only a few artists presented here who would identify
themselves as transhumanists per se.
Baltimorean Laure Drogoul is a fearless adventurer,
foraying into the marginal places of our culture and
consciousness–places where pseudo-science, mysticism,
and ghosts all jostle together. From exploring how
earthworms hear through their skin, to tapping into
late 19th century spiritualism and conducting séances,
to assembling a museum of common smells called the
Olfactory Factory, Drogoul has created an oeuvre over the
years as singular and outrageous as one could hope to
imagine. She is, simply put, a Baltimore art institution.
For this show, Drogoul presents an interactive,
glowing head, suspended in mid-air. The head is actually
a container for all of the compounds that compose our
human body—carbon, nitrogen, sodium, calcium, etc.
In creating the piece, Drogoul reflected on our daily
interactions with virtual people, from phone menus with
human voices, to autoresponders, to desktop computer
assistants. Yet the piece’s low-tech construction and the
black velvet magician’s curtain that frames it speaks
more to theatrical productions of Frankenstein than, say,
contemporary science fiction.
Drogoul’s piece speaks to the disproportion between
nightmarish visions of unnatural creations of synthetic
life and the workaday unreal humans we already allow
into our lives. She draws parallels between techno-
hysteria in the nineteenth century and the twenty-first,
suggesting that the future never looks like what we’ve
imagined, and tends to creep into our lives without
fanfare.
Opposite, top to bottom:
Writing Device. Séance for Lizette Woodworth Reese (1856-1935).
2005. performance with amplifier, pick ups, pen nibs, and paper.
The Root . . . (blue-eyed). 2004. site-specific sculpture, Evergreen
House, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore MD. wood, fabric,
paper, light, plantings, seed pods, dried roots with video.
15 x 10 x 10 feet.
Head of the Brave. 2007. video, plaster, and fabric.
Below:
She Pod of Rotten Enchantment. 2009. interactive sculpture,
Decker Gallery, MICA, Baltimore MD. mixed media with video,
fabric, wood, paper, plants, and a hammock. 16 x14 x12 feet.

Certainly Arakawa and Gins have devoted their

lifelong partnership to a transhumanist aim: to abolish
dying. Since 1963 the duo has worked across multiple
disciplines—architecture, science, printmaking, poetry—
with the aim of designing buildings that train human
bodies to live longer. For Arakawa and Gins, a sedentary
state is the beginning of death; the body must constantly
be challenged, thrown off-balance, and exposed to
multiple points of view. Accordingly, their houses are
dynamic, forbidding structures that are, quite simply,
difficult to live in and move through. Their work is a
compelling metaphor for our contemporary condition,
defined as it is by rupture, dislocation, and information
overload.

Arakawa and Gins define a human as “an organism

that persons,” i.e., a living being that undertakes a
discontinuous, moment-to-moment task of creating
and presenting an identity. This notion of the self
as something in flux, shaped by external forces and
feedback loops, is key to New York artist Geoffrey Alan
Rhodes’s Mirror Series. In this two-screen video projection,
Rhodes is shown standing in front of a bathroom
mirror—the place where people typically conduct private
rehearsals of the public persona. But Rhodes’s mirror is
far from ordinary. Via crude special effects, the artist adds
elements of technological fantasy: swapping out limbs,
creating a composite body, or even making his flesh
disappear altogether. In this way, Rhodes adds a new
wrinkle to traditional ideas about the circuit created when

10
a performer interacts with her or his own reflected or
recorded image, and makes a technological assault on the
idea of a unified self.
Chicago artist CarianaCarianne, meanwhile, truly pushes
the limits of the idea of becoming another person. In
her work, she stages real world actions that result in the
legal recognition of two individuals occupying the same
body—hers. In her installation here, Drawing and Being
Drawn, the artist illustrates her efforts to design and
patent an augmented double body. CarianaCarianne’s
effort to redefine herself via intellectual property laws
and social contracts poses difficult questions about the
extent of our right to self-determination—as well as
how the legal limits of personhood might be strained
in a future populated by superintelligent machines and
technologically enhanced humans.
Arlington photographer Jason Horowitz’s subjects
also initially seem to want to be two people at once.
Horowitz’s ultra-close-up portraits of drag queens bring
both the theatrical makeup of drag and the masculine
features they cover into vivid focus. Yet Horowitz’s true
subject is hyperreality and thinking of the camera lens
as the eye of the machine. His 8’ x 10’ digital images on
plexi are massive fleshscapes, appearing more like heroic
abstract paintings than photographs of human features.
These prints are extrapolated far beyond the resolution of
his source images, or even anything resembling ordinary
human eyesight. Horowitz’s work asks how our bodies
and the complex of desires around them will be perceived
by eyes other than our own. One might imagine how
nanobots, tiny machines that in the future could preserve
our health and maintain our body’s systems, would regard
their human hosts.
British filmmaker Phillip Warnell subjects not the
exterior but the interior of his body to the scrutiny of the
electronic eye. Warnell’s piece Sensors on the Abdominal
Wall offers footage from a live performance in which
the artist swallowed a pill-sized camera, allowing the
audience to see images of incredible exotic terrain inside
Warnell’s intestinal tract. Warnell’s piece invites us to
marvel at the dynamism of the human organism, and
asks us to consider if we can really accept the notion,
advanced by some transhumanists, that consciousness
can be transferred from a living body to a new machine
host without experiencing any loss. He denies French
theorist Jean Baudrillard’s observation that the body
“seems superfluous in its proper expanse, in the
complexity and multiplicity of its organs, of its tissues
and functions, because today everything is concentrated
in the brain and genetic code, which alone sum up the
12
Shane Hope’s artwork offers glimpses of a world that
does not yet exist and might be impossible to describe.
According to the New York-based artist, the future
could present a radical break in which all of existence is
broken apart into code, “powderized into fuzzy storms of
computational matter,” as the artist puts it. But it’s also
possible that our day-to-day future lives will look exactly
as they do now—albeit with radical invisible upgrades in
the form of machines that supercharge our brains, our
bodies, and physical matter itself.
Hope’s digital prints seem to follow the “fuzzy
storms” argument. These large, busy images depict
semi-abstract clouds of colliding bits of genetic code,
proteins, and nanotubes—as well as balloon animals,
junk sculptures, and other bizarre visual puns. These are
designed and rendered via computer, using customized
open-source molecular visualization systems. Hope
seems to suggest that artists will create one day not
with paint, paper, or pixels, but with the actual building
blocks of all matter. The artist looks to a future where
humans can build almost anything at an atomic scale
via nanofacture—the precise fabrication of ever-tinier
objects one molecule at a time. His pieces seem to hint
at many false starts to come, as well as messy struggles
between systems that are biological, computational, and
anywhere in between.
More familiar are Hope’s Compile-A-Child drawings,
which look uncannily like actual letters written by grade
school children. These brief text pieces, full of awkward
handwriting and disarming directness, are dated
anywhere from forty to eighty years from now, and
describe children’s dreams and desires using lingo more
appropriate to William Gibson than Doctor Seuss. Still,
aside from references to artificial beings and mehums
(mere humans), these pieces read like children’s letters
from any era—suggesting that no matter how different
our super-intelligent offspring might be from us, their
childhoods may still be recognizably human.
Opposite, top to bottom:
Molecula Simianus En Balloonus Animalia Meet Nanotubular
Lepidoptera. 2009. archival pigment print. 48 x 48 inches.
mehums are going. 2009. pen and crayon on paper. 12 x 9 inches.
Molecula Simianus En Balloonus Animalia Meet Nanotubular
Lepidoptera. 2009. detail.
operational definition of being.”

What about bodies that aren’t there at all? Baltimore

artist Laure Drogoul draws unlikely connections between
late 19th century spiritualism and our present-day
interactions now with virtual beings. Drogoul’s past
projects have embraced all sorts of transactions at the
borderlands of normal perception, including séances,
a museum of common smells, and a project exploring
how earthworms “hear” sound through their epidermis.
Her installation here asks to whom we are speaking
when we deal with those most unwelcome automatons:
auto responders, phone menus, and other imaginary
gatekeepers. The suspended, glowing Frankenstein’s
monster she offers here is, like much of her work, both
theatrical and unnerving.

Chicago-based artist Ivan Lozano’s video work is haunted

by ghosts of another sort: gay men who died in the
early years of the AIDS epidemic. 21st Century Machines:
A Technodrama for Future Generations juxtaposes the
futurespeak of transhumanist author Ray Kurzweil with
images from gay pornographic videos circa 1981. Lozano
equates the dreams of enhanced capacity and liberation
of a generation of young gay men—dreams eventually
consumed by tragedy—with transhumanist visions of
escaping our biology and defeating death.

New York performance and video artist Shana Moulton

considers the desire to project oneself into the future—
and the failure to do so. In her 2006 video, The Mountain
Where Everything Is Upside-Down, the artist’s alter-ego,
Cynthia, struggles to be at peace with her body. Cynthia
surrounds herself with faddish fitness equipment and
vintage new-age devices for relaxation or contemplation.
By the video’s end, Cynthia performs an act of radical
self-surgery: trepanation, an ancient procedure in which
a hole is opened in the skull, ostensibly to increase the
brain’s blood flow and achieve mystical experiences.
Ultimately Cynthia’s reliance on primitive medicine and
cheap consumer products to expand her mind speaks
eloquently to the problem of trying to envision the future Arlington photographer Jason Horowitz bears the from the subject’s body. He uses lighting one might Instead, they serve as sites where conflicting systems of
through the impoverished means of the past. unusual distinction in this group of artists of being the associate with fashion photography; a glittering white signification are exploded. The translucent compounds
only technologically augmented human: Because of a sheen dramatically limns every pore and crevice. The of drag makeup, already gaudy and theatrical, become
Shane Hope seems to believe that the future will be so hearing impairment, Horowitz has worn hearing aids for results, though sensational, are less than flattering, otherworldly when blown up to fill a wall. The masculine
many years. and sometimes disturbingly clinical. This is the body features behind the makeup are transformed into
radically unlike the present that any attempt to picture
Given how much Horowitz’s art deals with the as viewed not by the human eye, but the eye of the continents of musculature, razor burn, and plucked brows.
it is bound to fail. The New York artist uses two different
amplification and enhancement of sensory inputs, it machine. The resulting images seem to collapse visual categories
strategies for envisioning the unknowable. In one body would be easy to make too much of this fact. Horowitz The 8 x 10 foot photos here were printed especially of gender, race, and identity, and ask us to consider what
of work, Hope creates large-scale monotypes depicting constructs an extravagant hyperreality in which human for the AAC show, and bring Horowitz to a new frontier, eyes other than our own might make of the human body
huge semi-abstract clouds of colliding matter— flesh appears unfamiliar, abstracted, and exotic. His where his source images have been digitally stretched and its attendant web of signs and desires.
nanotubes, proteins, genetic code—referring to the photos are close-ups of eyelids, tongues, genitals— well beyond their actual pixel resolution. Horowitz’s
future interpenetration of human bodies and electronic and other puckerings and folds of skin, documented models here are DC area drag queens, yet these images Lady Sofia Karrington Bouvier No. 3. 2009. archival pigment print.
enhancements. More concrete are Shane’s smaller while the camera lens is typically only a few inches are not about drag culture or queer identity per se. 80 x 120 inches.

14 15
compile-a-child drawings, which appear to be letters
from a future generation of artificially intelligent children.
Despite strange lingo referring to a world of artificial
beings and mehums (mere humans), these read like
children’s letters from any era—suggesting that in even
the most thoroughly reconfigured future, some things
may still seem familiar.
And finally, New York artist Saya Woolfalk uses a projected
image of the future to shed light on the past—specifically,
the history of ethnographic studies. In her imaginary
inter-species utopia called No Place, dark-skinned,
sometimes faceless plant-animal hybrids covered with
soft protuberances occupy a day-glo colored world.
These creatures appear as amalgamations of various
stereotypical representations of native peoples—perhaps
suggesting that no matter how technologically advanced
we become, our ability to understand or define difference
may remain crude at best.
All of these artists show how the future is already with
us—not only as a series of emerging or anticipated
scientific breakthroughs, but also as culture.
Transhumanists employ a number of narratives about
how our lives will change in the next few decades; even
where these stories seem implausible, they nonetheless
play a role in shaping the content of debates about
ethics and public policy right now. We must never
underestimate the power of ideas, narratives and images
to change who we are and how we act in the world. The
ten artists in Transhuman Conditions understand this,
and accordingly rely on events that have not yet come to
pass—and that may never even materialize—to jostle us
from our complacent acceptance of life as it has been, is,
or possibly might be.
Jeffry Cudlin is Director of Exhibitions of the Arlington Arts Center,
an artist, critic, educator, and curator.
16
Chicago artist Ivan Lozano examines the construction of
gay identity and male eroticism by media technology—
and finds poetic associations in the eventual breakdown
of that technology’s artifacts. For his artwork, Lozano uses
found footage from gay pornographic films made around
1981, when the CDC first recognized the emergence of
AIDS. The look of Lozano’s pieces owes to his fascination
with the degradation of video images, particularly as
they are translated from VHS tape to computer pixels and
compressed, to be shared in the present via peer-to-peer
networks. Lozano compares the viewer’s encounter with
this imagery to a séance—where the ghosts of an earlier
generation of gay men, ravaged by the AIDS epidemic,
return to tell us about our future.
His 2007 video featured here, 21st Century Machines:
A Technodrama for Future Generations, is a curious
marriage of surreal establishing shots from an adult film
and the recorded voice of noted transhumanist author
Ray Kurzweil. The video footage reveals an unreal,
theatrical setting—a seemingly empty space in which
a desk, some picture frames, and a lone figure emerge
from the surrounding darkness, lit by a spotlight. The
figure, shirtless and shorn of body hair and body fat,
begins to write a letter with pen and paper—ironically
old-fashioned tools for a video purporting to be about
the future. As this idealized, objectified male body sits
before us, furiously writing, Kurzweil’s voice begins to
tell us what life will be like when we redesign our bodies.
According to Kurzweil, in the coming years we will “solve
age-old problems of need, if not desire, and will be in
a position to change the nature of mortality in a post-
biological future.”
Here, then, a hyper-real, anatomically perfect gay
male specimen becomes a sort of analog for a description
of a new, improved human organism. Both models refer
to fantasies for enhanced capacity, immortality, and the
satiation of deep-seated human needs; neither, strictly
speaking, actually exists.
Opposite:
21st Century Machines: A Technodrama for Future Generations.
2007. stills from the analog/digital video, 6:00.
THE ART OF STAYING HUMAN
Joel Garreau
We are at a turning point in history. For hundreds of
thousands of years, we aimed our technologies outward
at controlling our environment in the fashion of fire,
clothes, agriculture, cities, and space travel. Now, for
the first time, we are aiming our technologies inward,
altering our minds, memories, metabolisms, personalities,
progeny, and perhaps our souls. The shift is so profound
that serious people call it “radical evolution.” Says Gregory
Stock, director of the Program on Medicine, Technology
and Society at the UCLA School of Medicine, “The next
frontier is our own selves.” This is the world to which the
artists showing at the Arlington Arts Center are applying
their imaginations. Many of their works are fanciful. A few
are preposterous. But their project of imagining how we
might change human nature—and what that means—is
not nuts. You can see the realities taking shape in the
headlines.
New York artist Shana Moulton’s alter-ego Cynthia
inhabits a 1980s world of fluorescent colored rooms
filled with plastic flowers, cheap laminate furniture, and
kitschy new age paraphernalia. In Moulton’s videos,
Cynthia appears gripped by anxiety, hypochondria,
and melancholy. Through self-help books, faddish
exercise contraptions, and machines for contemplation,
meditation, or simply creating white noise, she tries to
escape the feeling of being imprisoned in her own body.
In The Mountain Where Everything Is Upside-Down,
Cynthia toys with an ab-rocker, a pilates ball, and a pair
of Chinese Baoding balls before turning to extreme
measures: She performs self-trepanation with a glowing
electronic crystal. Trepanation is one of the earliest
forms of surgery, dating back to the Neolithic era, and
involves punching a hole in a patient’s skull—ostensibly
to increase blood flow to the brain, and, ultimately,
grant access to altered states of consciousness. In this
case, Cynthia’s self surgery yields pulsating streams of
red—not blood per se; just some numinous substance
created via crude video effects roughly the same vintage
as Moulton’s furniture and costumes.
Moulton’s reliance on obviously fake, seemingly
self-defeating visual effects offers interesting parallels.
Each generation sees the promise of reinventing the
self or redefining human life through science. But most
consumers only ever see the weakest manifestations of
that promise, in products that quickly come to appear
opportunistic, cheap, and dated. Moulton’s videos show
the full strangeness of technology and popular culture
racing to keep up with our visions of the future—but also
racing toward obsolescence. Cynthia’s world is surreal
yet should seem familiar, and her desperate longing
for personal transformation can elicit both horror and
sympathy.
Opposite and below:
The Mountain Where Everything Is Upside Down. 2006. stills from
the digital video, 4:49.

Seven years ago, President Bush signed a $3.7 billion bill

to fund research at the molecular level that could lead
to medical robots traveling the human bloodstream
to fight cancer or fat cells. Matthew Nagle, in 2004,
became the first human to send e-mail using only his
thoughts. Scientists with a Foxborough MA firm called
Cyberkinetics implanted a computer device the size of a
baby aspirin in Nagle’s brain on the surface of his motor
cortex, which plans movement. Not only could he control
a computer cursor with his mind, he could control a
robotic hand. Researchers hope this technology will allow
the wheelchair-bound to walk. The military hopes it will
allow pilots to fly jets with their synapses. And in fact, this
past Christmas, Mattel and Uncle Milton Industries Inc.
introduced toys that don’t require surgery that allow kids
to control physical objects with their thoughts. These first-
generation playthings only involved levitating ping-pong
balls via a brain sensor on your forehead. But still, this is
the power of the gods we’re talking about. Telekinesis.

If ongoing human clinical trials continue successfully,

memory-enhancement drugs should be on the market
in this coming decade. They promise to banish baby
boomers’ senior moments. But memory is also at the core
of education. Think what such enhancers could do to
language learning alone. They could also allow parents to
buy improvements in their kids’ SAT scores of 200 points
or more. Memory enhancement could prove a greater
marketing blockbuster than Viagra.

Such advances in our strictly biological human qualities

18
don’t include the capabilities of the clever machines
with which we increasingly merge in order to project our
powers over vast distances. In the last week of the first
Gulf war, five Iraqi soldiers waved white flags at a Pioneer
unmanned air vehicle—the first time in history somebody
tried to surrender to a robot. When another unmanned
air vehicle, a Predator, successfully fired a Hellfire missile
at an Al Qaeda leader’s SUV in Yemen in 2002, it earned
the distinction of becoming the first robot to incinerate
a human being. Unmanned air vehicles have become so
ubiquitous over Afghanistan and Pakistan that in 2009, for
the first time, the United States Air Force started training
more robot-jockeys than conventional pilots.

You’ll see a lot more headlines like these in the next few
years. Four intertwining processes—call them the GRIN
technologies, for the genetic, robotic, information and
nano revolutions—are advancing at exponential rates,
regularly doubling and redoubling in power. By that
arithmetic, the amount of change we have experienced
in the past 20 years will be compressed into the next
eight; the amount of change of the past 50 years will be
accomplished in the next 14.

Scientists at the University of Pennsylvania who

created genetically modified “mighty mice” have been
deluged by calls from athletes and coaches who crave
this technology. These mice are shockingly large and
muscular. They have haunches like steers and necks wider
than their heads. Labs around the world have come up
with a variety of ways to increase muscle mass in mice by
as much as 40 percent, permanently, with no exercise, no
apparent side effects, and no obvious way to test for such
“gene doping.”

“Oh yeah, it’s easy,” said H. Lee Sweeney, chairman of

Penn’s department of physiology. “Anyone who can clone
a gene and work with cells could do it. It’s not a mystery.
You could change the endurance of the muscle or
modulate the speed—all the performance characteristics.
All the biology is there. If someone said, ‘Here’s $10
million; I want you to do everything you can think of in
terms of sports,’ you could get pretty imaginative.”
Sirtris Pharmaceuticals, a company headed by
researchers at Harvard Medical School, expects to have
pharmaceuticals on the market by the middle of the
decade that will reverse aging. “In five or six or seven
years,” said Christoph Westphal, a Sirtris co-founder, “there
will be drugs that prolong longevity.”
In the halls of elite technological institutions you hear
three scenarios for the future of human nature: Heaven,
Geoffrey Alan Rhodes’s work takes as its point of
departure the video-based performance art that
emerged in the late 1960s and early ‘70s. The New York
artist’s installation here, Mirror Series, recalls Bruce
Nauman painting his whole body in Flesh to White to
Black to Flesh (1968), as well as Vito Acconci steadily
pointing an accusatory finger at his own image displayed
in a video monitor in Centers (1971).
At the time they were created, these pieces were
described by critic and theorist Rosalind Krauss as
reflecting “the aesthetics of narcissism”—a condition
instigated by having the performer positioned
between the camera recording the performance,
and a monitor displaying the artist’s actions in real
time. The result is the transformation of the artist’s
psyche into an environment—suddenly there is no
history, no preexisting script or choreography, only the
improvisational action of the present, wholly dependent
on the enclosed feedback loop between the artist and
the electronic image.
Rhodes acknowledges the narcissism of his act by
performing it in front of a bathroom mirror, the place
where people privately rehearse the actions of their
public personae. But he adds various video effects that
allow him to appear to radically transform his own
flesh at will—from swapping out various body parts
to appearing to cut huge holes in his chest, eventually
making his entire body disappear before our eyes.
Rhodes seems to be describing our electronically
altered present and future, including everything from
the construction of one’s online identity via designing
an avatar, to the promise of redesigning one’s physical
appearance through cosmetic surgery or prosthetic
enhancements.
Mirror Series, 2006-2008. still from five 4-minute video loops
designed for mixed media installations.
“Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism”, Rosalind Krauss, October, Vol. 1.
(Spring, 1976), pp. 50-64.

20 21
Hell, and Prevail. According to the Heaven Scenario, we
will soon vanquish pain, suffering, disease, stupidity,
ignorance, ugliness, and even death. Constant advances
will conquer many of the evils that have plagued mankind
since the first ape came out of the trees. At an increasingly
rapid rate, headlines will feature miracles even more jaw
dropping than stem cells. Looking back at today’s world
20 years from now, we will be astounded at how far we’ve
come. Our newfound capabilities will redefine what it
means to be human, and we will be grateful.
That’s one possibility. In the Hell Scenario, however, the
powers unleashed by this curve of exponential innovation
fall into the hands of psychopaths or bumblers who—
intentionally or unintentionally—unleash supreme evil.
Our very existence as a species will become threatened in
the next 20 years. And that’s the optimistic version. In the
pessimistic version of the Hell Scenario, all life on earth is
wiped out.
The Prevail Scenario, meanwhile, is not some middle
ground between Heaven and Hell. It is in an entirely
different territory. It sees Heaven and Hell as techno-
determinist—that is, scenarios described by people who
think technology will inevitably control our history. The
Prevail Scenario, by contrast, bets on human cussedness.
It is a hunch that human nature will continue to feature a
capacity to surprise. The measure of success in the Prevail
Scenario is not how many transistors talk to each other. In
the midst of a “radical evolution” that we humans direct,
the triumph of the Prevail Scenario would be measured
by the richness, depth, and variety of the most important
connections, the ones among unpredictably clever
humans like ourselves. For none of us is as smart as all of
us. All three of these scenarios are credible. Each must be
taken seriously.
What’s driving all this change is an exponential increase
in innovation. The genetic, robotic, and nano technologies
are now accelerating as quickly as information technology
has for the past four decades. The rapid development
of all these fields is intertwined. In 1965 Gordon E.
Moore, director of Fairchild’s Research and Development
Laboratories, noted in an article for the 35th-anniversary
issue of Electronics magazine that the complexity of
“minimum-cost semiconductor components” had been
doubling every year since the first prototype microchip
was produced six years before. He predicted this doubling
would continue every year for the next 10 years. Little did
he know. Over time Moore’s Law has come to be the core
faith of the entire global computer industry, stated this way:
The power of information technology will double every 18
months, for as far into the future as we can imagine.
22
For his video installation, Sensors on the Abdominal
Wall, British filmmaker and performance artist Phillip
Warnell swallowed an untethered endoscopic camera.
This flashing pill-sized device traveled through the nine
meters of the artist’s gastro-intestinal tract, snapping
two photographs per second along the way. Analysis of
the resulting stream of images was provided for a live
audience by a London gastroenterologist.
Warnell is not the first artist to turn medical
imaging into art. In 1994, Beirut-born, London-based
artist Mona Hatoum created Corps Étranger, a piece in
which the artist’s body was explored with a prodding
endoscopic arm. The resulting video imagery, projected
at distressingly large scale on the floor of a small white
chamber, and accompanied by the amplified sounds of
the artist’s breathing and heartbeat, seems to speak of
violation and conquest—of technology’s dominion over
flesh.
But while Warnell’s capsule endoscopy produced
equally fantastic or repulsive imagery, it was not so much
about the intrusion of technology as the dynamism of the
human body itself. For Warnell, the remote eye wandering
through his digestive system was not an invader, it was
a tool at the service of the artist for projecting a virtual,
visual body. Through his project, Warnell makes the
invisible visible, albeit with its mysteries still intact—an
act that seems more like spiritualism than science. For
those considering a post-biological future for humanity,
one in which consciousness can be transferred from a
living body to a machine host, Warnell seems to suggest
that there is much that we still do not understand, and
much that could be lost.
Opposite and above:
Endo-Ecto. 2006-2009. images from live capsule endoscopy
performances, used in Sensors on the Abdominal Wall.
23
Sure enough, we are now approaching the 34th doubling.
A doubling is an amazing thing. It means the next step
is as great as all the previous steps put together. Thirty-
four consecutive doublings of anything man-made (an
increase of well over 16 billion times), especially in so
short a period, is unprecedented in human history. A
single iPhone has vastly more computer firepower than
did the entire North American Air Defense Command
when Gordon Moore first prophesized.

This is exponential change. It’s a curve that goes straight

up. In 1985 the human genome was thought to be a
code that might take until 2020 to crack, and only then
at astonishing cost. The feat was accomplished in 2001 at
a fraction of the estimated price, because technology, as
The Curve suggests, rapidly yielded computers far more
powerful and plentiful than those of 1985.

The next challenge is minutely modeling proteins, which

control all cellular processes in the body. Thanks to
protein analysis, said Paul M. Horn, senior vice president
of IBM Research when the project was announced, “One
day, you’ll be able to walk into a doctor’s office and have a
computer analyze a tissue sample, identify the pathogen
that ails you, and then instantly prescribe the treatment
best suited to your specific illness and individual genetic
makeup.”
What’s remarkable, then, is how increases in computer
power open new vistas in entirely different fields—in
this case, the ability to change how our bodies work.
Nathan Myhrvold, former technology chief of Microsoft,
points out that it cost billions to sequence the first human
genome. You’ll soon be able to get your own done for
$10, he expects.
If an implant in a paralyzed man’s head can read his
thoughts, if genes can be manipulated into better
versions of themselves, and if The Curve suggests that the
volume of change of the past 50 years will be compressed
into the next 14, then the line between what’s radically
engineered and what’s inborn blurs. Questions about the
future of human nature arise.
As we assume control of our own evolution, the inventory
of projects to work on will lengthen, according to Gregory
E. Pence of the University of Alabama’s philosophy
department. He starts with pain, infirmity, mental illness,
overpopulation, involuntary death, stupidity, cowardice,
biological cravings no longer good for us such as those
for burgers and fries, diseases that kill children, and
progressive diseases such as Alzheimer’s.
S AYA WO O L FA L K
Saya Woolfalk’s work describes a fictitious future utopia
called No Place—a land where all categories of race,
sexuality, and even biology are scrambled. In No Place,
humans and plants share genetic material. Brown-
skinned, more or less faceless creatures occupy a lush
island of rainbow-colored pyramids, disembodied eyes,
and pink phallus-like plants.
Woolfalk’s tools for depicting No Place at first seem
crude or child-like: Drawings and paintings are executed
in bright, garish colors with simple, reductive shapes for
people and buildings. Her video, Ethnography of No Place,
depicts live performances featuring fabric bodysuits
covered with puffy, sewn protuberances—which read
simultaneously as toys, plant matter, and sexual organs.
This apparent simplicity plays into all sorts of early
modern notions about the use of “primitive” cultures
as an antidote to the rationalism of the West—from the
Surrealists’ use of masks, to the Cubists’ appropriation of
the look of—if not the ideas behind—African sculpture.
Ethnography is a key word here, especially given that
NoPlaceans tend to look a bit like amalgamations of
various western stereotypes of native peoples living
in some fantastic, primeval land. Woolfalk’s future
civilization, then, is actually a means for commenting
on the construction of the exotic other by the West in
recent history. 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.
Opposite, top and bottom:
Colossus. 2006. gouache on paper, 14 x 17 inches.
Mausoleum. 2006. gouache on paper, 14 x 17 inches.

24
What we could use, Pence says, is more memory, better
immune systems, cells that do not age, stronger skeletons
with more muscle mass, more talent in the visual and
performing arts, as well as a better sense of humor, an
increased ability to process vast amounts of information
quickly, an increased ability to do advanced math and
speak many languages, an absence of genetic disease,
and a greater sense of wonder and curiosity. All of these
we can soon achieve with the GRIN technologies, Pence
believes.
Can we screw this up? Can we, by our well-meaning
attempts to reduce suffering and increase opportunity,
reduce human character? Without a doubt. Just ask
bioconservative Leon Kass, the former chairman of the
President’s Council on Bioethics and a leading proponent
of the Hell Scenario. He even makes the case for us
continuing to experience anguish, decrepitude, and
death. “A flourishing human life is not a life lived with
an ageless body or an untroubled soul,” he writes, “but
rather a life lived in rhythmed time, mindful of time’s
limits, appreciative of each season and filled first of all
with those intimate human relations that are ours only
because we are born, age, replace ourselves, decline, and
die—and know it.”
Advocates of the Heaven Scenario reject such limitations.
“We humans lack the capacity to form a realistic, intuitive
understanding of what it would be like to be posthuman,”
says Nick Bostrom of Oxford University. “Chimpanzees
can’t imagine the ambitions we humans have, our
philosophies, the complexities of our society, or the
depth of the relationships we can have with one another.”
Similarly Bostrom believes our present modes of being
are but a narrow slice of what is permitted by the laws of
physics and biology.
The hard question, then, is this: What if Kass is right
to worry and we continue to direct our own radical
evolution anyway, as seems likely? Right now, the
argument is usually conducted rather fruitlessly between
the advocates of the Hell and Heaven Scenarios. One side
sees the dangers and wants everything stopped. The
other side sees the promise and serves as cheerleaders.
They talk past each other.
For the Prevail Scenario to prevail—for us to be the
masters of change and not its pawns—we have to
recognize the dangers at the same time we accept that
transformation is coming. Then we have to figure out how
to make our solutions accelerate at the same pace as our
challenges. Figuring out how to expedite the response
of our culture and values could help us learn what these
26
tests of our humanity tell us about human nature.
The deep question is whether GRIN technologies will
alter the basics of the human condition. Can we imagine
them changing the way we shape truth, beauty, love, or
happiness? Can we imagine altering the seven deadly
sins of pride, envy, gluttony, lust, anger, greed, and sloth?
Or the virtues of faith, hope, charity, fortitude, justice,
temperance, and prudence?
As James Watson, co-recipient of the Nobel Prize for
discovering the structure of DNA, said, “No one really has
the guts to say it, but if we could make better human
beings by knowing how to add genes, why shouldn’t
we?” The very idea of aspiring to such godlike powers
is blasphemous to some. “Genetic engineering,” writes
Michael J. Sandel, a professor of political philosophy at
Harvard, is “the ultimate expression of our resolve to see
ourselves astride the world, the masters of our nature. But
the promise of mastery is flawed. It threatens to banish
our appreciation of life as a gift and to leave us with
nothing to affirm or behold outside our own will.”
He could be right. Nonetheless, Rodney Brooks, former
director of the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, believes “that
in just 20 years the boundary between fantasy and
reality will be rent asunder. Just five years from now
that boundary will be breached in ways that are as
unimaginable to most people today as daily use of the
World Wide Web was 10 years ago.”
Joel Garreau is the author of “Radical Evolution: The Promise and
Peril of Enhancing Our Minds, Our Bodies—And What It Means
to Be Human.” A long-time Washington Post reporter and editor
who covered technology’s impact on society, he is now the Lincoln
Professor of Law, Culture and Values at the Sandra Day O’Connor
College of Law and the Lincoln Center for Applied Ethics at Arizona
State University, and is a fellow at the Washington think tank The
New America Foundation.
27
SUGGESTED READING
Architecture: Sites of Reversible Destiny (Architectural
Experiments After Auschwitz-Hiroshima). Arakawa and
Madeline Gins. Academy Editions, 1994.
Making Dying Illegal. Architecture Against Death: Original to
the 21st Century. Arakawa and Madeline Gins. Roof Books,
2006.
An Introduction to Cybercultures. David Bell. Routledge,
2001.
Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology
Revolution. Francis Fukuyama. Picador, 2003.
Radical Evolution: The Promise and Peril of Enhancing Our
Minds, Our Bodies—and What it Means to be Human.
Joel Garreau. Doubleday, 2005.
Architectural Body. Madeline Gins and Arakawa.
The University of Alabama Press, 2002.
How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics,
Literature, and Informatics. N. Katherine Hayles.
The University of Chicago Press, 1999.
My Mother Was a Computer: Digital Subjects and Literary
Texts. N. Katherine Hayles. University of Chicago Press,
2005.
The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology.
Ray Kurzweil. The Penguin Group, 2005.
Materializing New Media: Embodiment in Information
Aesthetics. Anna Munster. Dartmouth, 2006.
The Prosthetic Impulse: From a Posthuman Present to a
Biocultural Future. Marquard Smith and Joanne Morra,
editors. The MIT Press, 2006.
Redesigning Humans: Choosing Our Genes, Changing Our
Future. Gregory Stock. Mariner Books, 2003.
AAC programs are made possible through the
generous support of the Virginia Commission for
the Arts/NEA, The Arlington Commission for the Arts,
The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts,
The Morris & Gwendolyn Cafritz Foundation, Strategic
Analysis, The Eugene & Agnes E. Meyer Foundation,
Altria Group, Inc., The Washington Forrest Foundation,
BNA, Harpo Foundation, The Arlington Community
Foundation, and our members. Generous in-kind
support is provided by Arlington Catering.

Cover: Geoffrey Alan Rhodes, Mirror Series.

2006–2008. stills from five 4 minute video loops
designed for mixed media installation.

Published in conjunction with the exhibition

Transhuman Conditions, curated by Jeffry Cudlin,
Director of Exhibitions, at the Arlington Arts Center,
Arlington VA, January 29 through April 3, 2010.

Copyright © 2010 by the Arlington Arts Center

3550 Wilson Boulevard, Arlington VA 22201
www.arlingtonartscenter.org 703.248.6800

Catalogue design: Catherine Satterlee

aac : arlington arts center