Rethinking The Human
14 / 03 / 2022
The post below will showcase my designs for “Rethinking The Human”, along with some information about the process behind these designs and the inspiration I drew from creating them. I will also showcase the description I wrote to accompany the designs
THE INSPIRATION BEHIND
THE INSPIRATION BEHIND
For Rethinking The Human, I was hugely inspired and influenced by themes I touched upon in my “Cultures of Realism” class.
Dealing with how “real” or “human” the human really is - and how realisms are grounded in knowledge about the body and mind, as revealed through anatomy, physiology, psychology, criminology.
I wanted to call into question the “humanity” of humanity and draw the conversation towards a critical viewpoint our bodies we inhabit, and how reality is made to function around them.
The Instagram Post
This is why, for the reasons detailed above, I wanted the designs and illustrations used to represent my plight to “call into question” the human form.
I went for passport texts on top of faces along with the man behind a water glass because I thought both of these images to reflect quite an interesting condition of humanity - identity and form.
How we humans rely so heavily on official paperwork and made up concepts to keep us sane and ignorant when it comes to the extremely complex creatures that we are.
Many forms and many identities, all in one.
The Event Description
The human. A living entity that thinks and is singular in its capacity for reason, rationality, and purpose creation. Seneca famously described humanity as “the reasoning animal”. Neither god nor animals - we are Homo Sapiens.
How human is the human? The “human” body is the domain of codes, cells, enzymes, and genes; of metabolic networks, biopathaways, immunoknowledge and protein folding; of synoptic networks, fibre axon terminals, and large dendritic trees. None of these things are human in any meaningful way.
Also, we share 99% of our biological information with chimpanzees.
So, if we are made up of inhuman processes, cells, and organisms, then what does it mean to be human? And what do we mean when we talk about the inhuman? What is technology doing to the idea of the human? Is humanity our consciousness?
The spectacular development of biogenetics is gradually dissolving the frontiers between humans and animals on the one side and between humans and machines on the other, giving rise to the idea that we are on the threshold of a new form of Intelligence, a “more-than-human” singularity in which mind will no longer be subject to bodily constraints, including those of sexual reproduction. We as species are at a point where we can transcend ourselves, we can abandon what it means to be human and embrace what is yet to come.
Each of us humans are in equal measures, inhuman. We have inhuman capacities within all of us. The inhuman is already there, the question is, how do we make good on that?