transhumanism (2022) - a reflection
fig. 1: greed
this is one of seven panels from my 2022 work "transhumanism". it was my visual arts HSC final body of work. i ended up coming second in visual arts and getting nominated for artexpress which was fire. but looking back at this work there are many things i would change. the title, "transhumanism", exemplifies to me the shallowness of the work. transhumanism itself is an ideology that promotes the enhancement of humanity by developing futuristic technologies that supposedly improve us as a species. some examples could be AI, bionic limbs and genetic engineering. all of which does sound a bit like eugenics and a bit elon musk-like. my work wasn't really exploring these, or even critiquing it, it was just using the cool bionic limbs for the cyberpunk-esque grimes 2020 miss anthropocene aesthetic.
another thing about it was the heavy use of naked or partially clothed female bodies. thinking about the guerrilla girls' poster that states, "do women have to be naked to get into the MET museum? less than 5% of the artists in the modern art sections are women, but 85% of the nudes are female." i feel like i contributed to the epidemic of people drawing nameless, sometimes faceless naked women in compromising and sexual positions just for the sake of beauty and aesthetics. this is especially evident in the photo above, with the references to bondage wear in her various limb attachments. again, this wasn't some criticism on the objectification and subjugation of women, it was another crude sci-fi sexualisation that looks like something a man drew. let's be real - the female gaze is nowhere to be found in this, and was unfortunately never given a thought during the process. as a person of colour, i wanted to show a more diverse range of bodies and skin tones, but i feel that this fell flat. to me, these are some of the more unforgiveable aspects of this work.
fig. 2: sloth
in one of the other panels of this work, lays a woman on the floor, with her back turned to the viewer, her robotic-looking prosthetic legs strewn across the foreground. it's evident that i used the aesthetic of limb differences to make some surface level observation about transhumanism as a concept which i feel is very insensitive and a bit corny.
as you may have picked up by the names of each panel, there's a bit of a 'seven deadly sins' theme which is one of my least favourite aspects of this work. i guess i was trying to go for some kind of critique of humankind but it doesn't really come across that way and the whole thing is a bit gimicky. especially in the following:
fig. 3: lust
like girl what is this! did i predict character.ai?? i just feel like this is so surface level and doesn't communicate any deeply intellectual concepts to the viewer. and it should have because i was working on this body of work for almost a whole year.
fig. 4, 5, 6: gluttony, wrath and envy; respectively
i don't remember why i made them eat a baby but whenever i see babies in art it gives pro-life to me which i'm not supportive of. there's this generic robot figure that looks suspiciously like the security bots in FNAF: Security Breach. i feel like it was meant to be a personnification of AI but it falls flat because it doesn't really communicate any of my actual opinions on AI. it's portrayed as more of a passive figure, which would be fine if there was a point being made about humans misusing AI, but there isn't. there really isn't much of a point at all. there's one more panel which is of course "pride" but it doesn't really have any references to transhumanism or AI or anything - really just a nothing burger. it was also the last panel i completed and was on a time crunch at the time so the quality is significantly lower. i know that everyone hates their old art, but this work still gets brought up to me every so often and it just really does not align with my values anymore. this whole thing has been very negative so i'm gonna name some things i like about it!
i still do really like the robot aesthetic of all the cables and whatnot. i use cables a lot in my current work and am constantly drawing robots (transformers!!). i also like the damp, algae-covered tiled backgrounds i used for each panel, they were fun to draw and they tie all the panels together nicely. i think i did a good job at rendering some of the skin and hair of the figures. and my favourite panel will always be "greed" despite all the bdsm gear randomly strewn all over their body. anyway, let me know what you think!!
SIENNA, OUT!
jacobvanloon
romaincrisis
izzy806
janainaart
ellievsbear
blakekathryn
