I decided to revisit this book as Lucy McRae is a massive inspiration. Particularly as I am now developing the sound and have secured the use of some technology, I am exploring how Mcrae collaborates and speaks about her work.
- Art and speculative design – Foreward.
- Ballet and interior design – ‘body architect’ – Foreward.
- How human biology might evolve with the assistance of design, emotional reconditioning, molecular biology and technology -Foreward.
- Video, photography & Installation – Foreward.
- McRae’s work speaks to the possibilities for human existence into the future – Foreward.
- Imagine other ways of being – pg2
- The body was the constant in her work – pg 2
- Speculate on how our biology might evolve and be augmented by a mixture of physical design, emotional reconditioning, molecular biology and technology – how humanity might move through the world in the future – pg 2
- Ballet – discipline, strength, beauty and grace. Performance and pushing my body to extremes – pg 2
- Explore the limits of where I exist and do / don’t fit in – pg 2
- Relationship between designed space and inner psycho-emotional world. Microcosm that I could control. – pg 2
- Relationship between the body, its physiological capacity and design. – pg 5
- Speculative fashion concepts – pg 5
- Bluebell – heart rate sensors and LED projectors. – pg 5
- Electronic tattoo – subcutaneous ink – pg 5
- Reimagine the body – mood – pg 5
- Low-tech materials for high tech conversations. – pg 9
- skins – pg 9
- Tell a story about the future of the body – pg 9
- Evolution – concept has changed through the intervention of science and medicine – pg 9
- The role science and technology play in our identity – pg 9
- Philips Clive would always say ‘The body is a platform for innovation’. – pg 11
- Rebelling against conventional ideals of beauty that we saw being perpetuated by the plastic surgery industry. Corrective surgery is creating a mono-aesthetic – pg 11
- Chameleons and animals like the octopus – theres one that can completely electrify its skin. Reptiles with skin like armour – pg 11
- Film – materials on the body in motion – pg 14
- Merging of humans and technology – pg 14
- Cyborgs ability to extend beyond normal human physical limitations – pg 14
- Disrupting the masculine stereotypes that have long come out of Hollywood with a more feminine approach to advancing the body – pg 14
- Swallowable parfum – design at a cellular level smell and pheromone excretion – pg 16
- Technology as a vapour or a liquid you could swallow – pg 16
- Story, branding and film to a far-future concept – pg 16
- All of my artworks are prototypes. I am interested in disrupting reality with provocations that ask impossible questions. – pg 16
- Coloured liquids and soluble fluids – chemistry lab – pg 16
- How emotion could exist in a digital world – pg 19
- Music videos – fat monk, technology puppets, the biological bakery – pg 19
- Cloning, biohacking and genetic engineering – pg 19
- Biology could develop in the home – CRISPR – going to change the entire course of human evolution – pg 19
- Chlorophyll skin – pg 19
- How we could experience an interface with beauty products in a different way – pg 20
- Morphe is a whimsical take on the future of the beauty industry, depicting super sensory beauty treatments for the human body. – pg 20
- Speculations about the body beyond earth – pg 21
- Temple Grandin – squeeze machine – pg 22
- The future day Spa – pg 22
- Oxytocin when you have sex, hug someone or breastfeed feelings of love, empathy and trust – pg 22
- Designing experiences – pg 22
- Biometric Mirror – an algorithm that could psychoanalyse people using facial recognition and construct faces into perfect symmetry. – pg 24
- Sci-fi beauty salon – pg 24
- Mathematical equation designed by a Hollywood plastic surgeon – Marquardt Beauty Mask and morphs your face into what is considered biostatistically perfect – pg 25
- I speculate on the future of the body and question who and where we are headed I build worlds and objects that contemplate what kind of future we’re creating. – pg 25
- Process is highly collaborative – pg 25
- Zspeculative design and science fiction – pg 58
- Detailed and lengthy process of making large numbers of props for her science fiction world. – pg 58
- Leigh Bowery and Stelarc. The sense of an extended body, the body as future, a body upon which the vicissitudes of the past are carved, but as pasts to a future different from the designs that technology would determine, – pg 58
- What, if the future is fleshy constitutes a body in this globalised world of corporate identity and personal branding. The body, corporeal, the corporation, incorporated on the network of bodies, personal bodies branded by the corporate. – pg 58
- Colour is explicitly used to establish or progress a narrative world, and to demarcate the work as dealing with the future. – pg 59
- Golden Yellow/ Bright Green/ Cold Blue/ Bright White/ Blood Red/ Gold. Using colour to create a speculative world, liquid colour is the fundamental element of this ‘commercial’. – pg 59
- Swallowable Parfum – speculates on a method of modifying our immune systems to control the chemical messages we transpire to the outside world. – pg 61
- Researching the science of the body:what happens when technology enters the body? Do we become it, does it become us, do we become something new? How would the consumer market adopt such technology and how would the consumer market adopt such technology and how would it change the way we behave with products? – pg 61
- Swallowable Parfum asks whether the beauty industry could be more directly, chemically, genetically responsible for the way that we seek sexual partners, rather than passively reinforcing gender as it does now. – pg 61
- McRae sees a future where the beauty industry collaborates with bio-engineers – a fleshy future – and she knows the power of speculative storytelling in helping to bring this kind of disruption about. – pg 61
- Morphe – asks what the future of health and beauty might be. – pg 61
- The palette deepens the viewers immersion in the narrative world because the slight variations in saturation of the same hue create layers of reality, a kind of milky parallax that coaxes and comforts the eye. pg 61
- Translucent plastic jugs… branding… bottles of colour leaking into plastic bags, making a dull fleshy colour. – pg 62
- Magnifying screen was used to such great effect of technology designed for and by humans – pg 62
- Beauty is science, it always has been. The future is the product of the past. – pg 62
- Beauty industry has always aspired to genetic manipulation – pg 62
- Annalee Newitz’s speculations in her novel Autonomous (2017) – pg 62
- Mariko Ohara’s early 1990’s feminist science – fiction work Hybrid Child. – pg 62
- Make your maker is visceral and in that makes us ponder the violence of nature, genetics, eating and reproduction – pg 62
- Swallowable Parfum (second film)… visual motif… Rather than making a sci-fi film, McRae makes a sci-fi world – creating and building the world. – pg 65
- Radical Diversity – she imagines a feminised, fleshy future of genetic experimentation that can accommodate the complicated ethical and technical questions that are currently the stuff of sensationalist and simplistic headlines that serve more to reinforce Cold War – style tribalisms than explore the consequences of gene-editing. – pg 65
- Prepping the body for space – less of a short film than a set of moving visual notes documenting an installation that consisted of the props featured in the film. – pg 65
- The body/ bodies move within the fabric, forming and receding like mercury in a dance somewhat reminiscent of Jane Fonda’s in Barbarelas (1968) without the parodic striptease vibe. – pg 65-66
- The voiceover tells us that being in such a vacuum is like being hugges by a machine. – pg 66
- Future day spa – speculate on what it will be like ‘prepping the body for space’. McRae’s casting of two sets of twins in the work is a brilliant gesture towards the relationship between natural genetics and human cloning efforts. – pg 66
- Colour palette of McRae\s earlier films has been replaced by the stark whites and reflective silvers, with occasional faint pink hues. – pg 66
- Biometric Mirror – extends the lab’s existing facial emotion recognition programme by applying the geometric algorithm of ‘facial perfection’ known as the Marquardt Beauty Mask, developed by the plastic surgeon Stephen Marquardt. Tapping into current anxieties about facial recognition, privacy and algorithmic surveillance. – pg 67
- Joy Buolamwini’s visual poem, ‘AI ain’t I a woman’ speech. – pg 67
- The question of what biases are being enacted in these algorithms is current and crucial. – pg 67
- Artworks that provoke questions around the nature of human existence and our evolution as a species beyond inherited biology and even earth. – pg 96
- Is this the kind of future we are engineering – one that has tempered expression, tamed emotion, strengthened stamina and apparently eliminated human connection? – pg 96
- The institute of Isolation presents a provocative vision of a possible future that is profoundly haunted by the past. The film’s aesthetic is retro-futuristic. – pg 96
- These empty public spaces appear to have been decommissioned, producing an abandoned, apocalyptic atmosphere. – pg 96
- An eerie soundtrack enhances the sense of discord by contrasting organic and mechanical resonances such as white noise, a heartbeat, whistling wind and piercing feedback resembling tinnitus. – pg 96
- A sense of intense scrutiny and surveillance is heightened by the prominence of camera monitors and drone footage, the latter introducing a subtly threatening arial perspective as it tracks the woman’s movements through different landscapes. – pg 96
- Surveillance technologies are a recurrent theme in sci-fi and they provide means for the powerful to control the powerless. – pg 96
- Many of the settings are large spaces that dwarf the protagonists body, just as outer space does the astronaut, creating a sense of vastness. – pg 99
- When McRae’s protagonist exits the greenhouse, she walks between meticulously shaped circular garden beds that are reminiscent of the body’s cells and suggestive of humanity’s drive to order chains through the curation of genetics. – pg 99
- The branding is typical of space agencies like NASA, as well as government agencies like the US Department of Defense. – pg 99-102
- While physical aspects of adaptation can be accurately measured , psychological suitability for long-term space travel remains largely immeasurable and unpredictable. – pg 102
- Over her thin bodysuit, the woman dons insulation like an exoskeleton, straps on thick padding like body armour, puts on soundproofing like a lifejacket. This increases the bulk of her body, gives the woman a somewhat militaristic appearance. – pg 102