Artist : Pauline Batista
Year: 2019
“Is Your System Optimized?” dives into our bodies and the grey ethical areas of an ever-increasing drive to enhance our human attributes and capabilities. Our current culture promotes excellence and demands the utmost performance of our bodies and minds. Aided by accelerating advances in technology, we as humans are striving for the efficiency and perfection of machines. This self-optimization is a response to a systemic reality, which drives us to commodify ourselves. The commodification is especially present in female bodies, which act as incubators for human optimization. Yet the emergence of an enhanced human still requires a return to the body from the petri-dish.
All the works in “Is Your System Optimized?” act like props, setting the stage for an all-encompassing environment that implicates the viewer in the problematics of the drive to self-optimize. I look to the future as I examine the space between technology, intimacy, and the medical- playing with ideas of enhancements using tactile objects and materials, such as polymer balls, slime and PVC.
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