Falling Human

2020 – Interactive Installation
Award: Maison de la Marionette (Tournais) – Festival Lumen#5

Hardware: metal, wood, computer, IR camera, Pico-projector, IR Light, engin, 3D modeling human puppet
Software: Isadora, Max msp
size: 100cm long, 50cm wide, 170cm high – 1 copy

From the fall of a particular human – with all its symbolic implications – to the fall of a certain idea of our civilization, the falling human makes me reflect on our condition, the fragility of our “standing” position. He challenges me organically, starting from the story of the little human who tries to stand up, through the wounded human struggling to get up, to the story of Homo Sapiens rising to his disembodiment , its replacement – Homo Deus in the making – its fall or its annihilation.

Homo Deus is a concept developed by, among others, Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari in his eponymous book Homo Deus: A Brief History of the Future. Humans now mastering creation, the world and the genome, they have taken the place of God: capable of creating other species but above all of improving humans through genetics, robotics, the human interface. The post-humanist project places the human, or at least some, in the place of God: capable of living eternally, of changing, of improving, of decorporating. Fall of Homo sapiens therefore, in favor of Homo Deus. This prospect fascinates and scares me, hence my desire to work on it.
The empowerment of the shadow of the human could also be the metaphor for the advent of the singularity, the emergence of consciousness within a machine, following the exponential development of Artificial Intelligence.

© images Alexandre Quintin – Maison de la Marionette, Lumen#5

Désir

3 résine Sculptures + Augmented Reality sculptures + NFT

Désir#2 in Augmented Reality @Galerie Charlot for DAW Exhibition and in front of Musée de la Chasse for Marais Digital.

The series of sculptures «desires» by Thomas Israel, is part of his reflection on transhumanism and our growing will and ability to modify our bodies according to our desires. If the modifications he brings to his own body via the modification of his 3D scan, sorts of modified self-portraits, are of course not yet achievable by contemporary medicine, these avatars foreshadow the possible aspirations of the partisans of morphological freedom.