Drones out in safari

"Will Burrard-Lucas, a wildlife photographer, built the armored "BeetleCam" so that his camera could get up close and personal with dangerous animals. After some trial and error, he headed to Kenya's Masai Mara with his brother, Matt Burrard-Lucas, to photograph the lions there. The adorable remote-control vehicle ended up doubling as a toy for the lion cubs, making for some amazing images."

Source: The Atlantic

The aesthetics of the post-human

Images made of numbers. A virtual presence, auto-instantiated in direct connection from the source. Real-time portraits of complex sets of movements. Non anthropomorphological reflections of bodily actions. Non gendered, neutral images of functions. Non-conscious perceptions actualized in material, virtual forms. Bodies in motion converted into symbols. Bodies in control. Sense-making machines. Fleeing mirrors.

"Content is Queen", a generative video painting

"Content is Queen" by Sergio Albiac is a portrait created using an innovative generative technique developed by the artist called "generative video painting". This generative portrait reflects on the foundations of democracy and the resilient nature of the structures of power.

Experiences of infinite space

"Fireflies on the Water, by Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama, offers an out-of-this-world experience from the confines of a modest room paneled with mirrors and adorned with 150 tiny beads of light deliberately suspended throughout the compact space. Upon entering the room, there's an illusionary effect that gives the impression of infinite space reflected on all sides and in the two inches of water that flows below."

Image and text from My Modern Met

Bodies in transition

"Artist Andre Wee constructs figurative and metaphoric representations of limbo in his series titled Forming and Fragmenting. The artist interprets this collection of work as "An experience of being of two different states at the same time and yet, not belonging to either" and refers to the subjects' disposition as being in "an eternal state of transition." It is unclear whether his geometric renderings are regenerating their human form or disintegrating into nothingness."

As seen on My Modern Met (more artworks in this link).

Lead and technology will follow

I've read an interesting article in the New York Times called "Are We Living in Sensory Overload or Sensory Poverty?" by Diane Ackerman. She gives some great insights which help bringing to the surface the notions of embodiment, presence and the senses in the discussion of human-technology relationships. I'd like to comment on some of her ideas.   

"... we’re living in sensory poverty, learning about the world without experiencing it up close, right here, right now, in all its messy, majestic, riotous detail. The further we distance ourselves from the spell of the present, explored by our senses, the harder it will be to understand and protect nature’s precarious balance, let alone the balance of our own human nature."

I believe that the search for balance is key in the face of any technological innovation and so-called "progress". Encouraged by scientific intelligence and high doses of imagination, technology tends to expand itself to the level of science-fictional proportions, but when it faces human interaction, this comes as a reality check that puts it back on its tracks. Any technology that do not align to and serve the human condition and its purposes will fail, because technology is only in relation to the biological realm. In this sense, how useful is to long for a previous historical period of life under certain bio-technological conditions in which humanity used to be more in contact with nature?

The senses are at work also in our relationship with technology, but they are contested by its apparent complexity, although more so is technology, which undergoes the test of human perception. What doesn't pass the sensory and corporeal scrutiny, it will fade as a useless technology. Presence is also in our interaction with any kind of technology, like when driving a nail with a hammer or browsing the Internet.

But of course, I understand what Ackerman is referring to: how can I know what a tree is if I haven't seen it, touched it, felt it... how can I ever truly know India if all I have seen are photos in a computer... it's true that digital media seem to be getting between us and the concrete world we live in. But there are signs of balance, which is evident as media technology is increasingly going mobile. Our bodies, our senses, our drive to interact with nature have taken the development of technology to more intuitive, safer, grounds. In this world, everything is in constant change, and "transitioning" is the normal state of things. If we want for things to fall into the right place, we just have to exercise that human quality that it is all about being present: patience.