Natash Vita-More | Electro 2011, Human Enhancement
of Life Expansion
Statement
Technology can enable a distinct and consequential array of human physiological and cognitive enhancements, from automating communication to simulating mental processes, including reasoning and perception. Among these technologies, the human-computer interface is further intensified by the potential of emerging and speculative technologies that continue to reawaken a transdisciplinarity between soft and hard sciences and artistic and design-based processes. Rather than just attaching or inserting objects into the body for physical intensification, transformative human enhancement proposes a new axis for artistic approaches, one in which life expansion—the combination of enhancing biological attributes, prolonging life beyond biology, and sustaining personhood—is the locus of experience. The theoretical model engages new media encountered in the sphere of emerging and speculative technologies of life expansion for the field of transformative human enhancement research. This model is developed out of cybernetics, especially homeostasis and self-regulation a, and builds on the works of neurophilosophy, regenerative processes, and the emerging technologies of artificial general intelligence and whole brain emulation, which spirals us forward toward the transhumanist aesthetic of a posthuman future. This aesthetic of life expansion is an integration of new media arts. It is also an intervention at the boarder between human augmentation and life expansion and suggests that to cross this ideological boarder artists need a cultural defense—a passport toward sustaining agency and perceptual experiences in reaching regenerative states, including biosynthetics and duplication of visual and narrative duration.