Mechanicus, Mirko Febbo

.Using live stock data from IEXcloude, this work self-destructed itself through the show to the motion imposed by the data (transported via Modbus and Rs485)

Archival photographs from Stelarc

The exhibition featured thirteen works, spanning sculpture, digital durational performance, installation, and archival photography, as well as ‘on-the-market’ tech-based body modification items, such as implants and prosthetic limbs. This opened a conversation with ‘bio-hacking’ developers (Dangerous Things) about the ethics of wearable tech and possibility of future collaborations to showcase their developments within a cultural or trans-disciplinary context.

“And all of you who are in love with hectic work and whatever is fast, new, strange – you find it hard to bear yourselves, your diligence is escape and the will to forget yourself.”

- Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

Performance Machines: Products of Acceleration situated itself in the bright white stark reality of our every day, and the shiny promises of our near future. By investigating the effects of excess productivity upon our experience of time, the exhibition raised questions as to which future we are so frantically heading.

The contemporary age, fuelled with the incessant drive of neoliberal ideology and its promises of freedom and prosperity, has brought with it a sense of temporal acceleration. With Time now a commodity, and the dynamics of competition, production, and expansion as our governing forces, every moment must be used to its maximum proficiency. Simultaneously, schizophrenic potentiality permeates our psyches as we are inundated with technological innovation, networked everything, immediate satisfaction, and informational overload. With so much to do, and so little of that expensive, precious time, we have catapulted ourselves into a culture of urgency. The result is not simply speed inserted at the centre of life but an open-ended continuum of acceleration, without foreseeable limit.

In this acceleration has further emerged a symbiosis between man and the machine. With the external world in its state of unending progression, the body by comparison becomes feeble; it falls out of equilibrium. The consequence is such that the body, too, must become a project in order to realign with the ethos of advancement, innovation, progress, and prosperity. Through modifications, wearables, implants, and even the cult of health and beauty, the body attempts to assert its vitality, its legitimacy, and its materiality.

Yet amongst this drive, immense productivity, and potentiality, there is a discontinuity. We live to consume, but never digest. We sleep less, dream less, love less, think less. We are propelled into an opaque future guided only by the notion that we can have, do, be, more, without stopping to breathe, to question, or contemplate how it is that we wish to be. This exhibition is not made to inspire a techno- nor future-pessimism, only to permit the possibility of agency upon our becoming.

Auger and Loizeau

Auger and Loizeau are a design duo, now working in MIT’s Media Lab. The work presented was a 2001 speculative design work proposing an implantable telephone chip for teeth.

The artists sold the work as a legitimate wearable, gaining it significant media attraction and opening a controversial discourse. The emails pictured below were received by Auger and Loizeau following the sensationalisation of the project.

Featuring: Paula Morison / Mirko Febbo / Josh Wirz / TJ Chen / Karanveer Singh / Victoria P Gill / Stelarc / Dangerous Things / James Arguer and Jimmy Loizeu / The Alternative Limb Project / The Cyborg Foundation