Is Your System Optimized?

“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. I examine the space between technology, intimacy, and the medical.

My work “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.

“Is Your System Optimized?” is primarily composed of photographs but pushes into space through an all encompassing installation and sound environment. I utilize sound frequencies to activate exhibition spaces and the photographs- creating a new temporality. These environments then add another dimension to the reading of any singular image. The viewer becomes enveloped aurally as well as by the physical space, which was altered to parallel a void present in some of the series imagery.

The work is inspired by my ongoing research into CRISPR (* allows for direct genetic modification of embryos),  Pink Noise frequency, anatomical theaters as the birthplace of modern medicine, and the ‘quantified self’. I examine the space between technology, intimacy, and the medical- playing with ideas of enhancements using tactile objects such as water balls and slime.

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.

Link to soundscape: https://www.dropbox.com/s/8p7tc5nhpogu8cs/Soundscape%20for%20Is%20Your%20System%20Optimized%3F.mp3?dl=0