SABOR

Sabor is a photographic project on the human-artificial boundary. Through Sabor, a humanoid built in Switzerland a century ago, it explores technological immortality, transhumanism, and the erosion of intimacy when life is codified and replicated

Sabor

Artificial perfection has never ceased to seduce the collective imagination. SABOR's photographs are a hypothesis of beginnings. A leap into the past to rediscover the origins of the future.

The day after August Huber, still a boy, dreamed of building one of the first androids ever made in the world, the sun rose in a metallic dawn that would forever mark the destiny of humanity. Sabor is a metaphor carried across five continents like a circus attraction, a brochure of evolution, an evolutionary textbook capable of indoctrinating paying spectators on what was right to hope for their future. Inside Sabor, two metresand thirty-seven centimetres tall, were five hundred metres of cable, large rechargeable batteries and radio-controlled switches. With two antennas stuck in his ears and a steel body reminiscent of Bauman's iconography of “The Wizard of Oz”, Sabor – and today each of us – had the same Promethean ambition to defeat the tyranny of time, to replicate life, to achieve a state of eternity through the stubborn and obsessive application of technology.

But every desire for immortality carries with it the shadow of an irreparable loss: what remains of humanity when the essence of its intimacy can be codified, optimized and reproduced?

Through a series of images that oscillate between documentary and vision, the SABOR photographic project explores the intimate and collective motivations that drove the pioneers of science to generate something that, despite its absolute otherness, resembles us frighteningly. The double of what we are.

What does it mean to be alive in a world that imitates life? Is it possible to remain human in technological dysmorphism?

Sabor indicates the threshold between the brain and the circuit, sensory stimulation and electrical impulse, the finiteness of flesh-and-blood bodies and the infinite striving of technological drive. In the age of AI, the humanoid Sabor is the archetype of our present. All that remains is to investigate the fascination and vertigo of transhumanism, photographs that question the boundary between identity and simulation, between fragility and algorithm. The light touches the synthetic materials as if searching for traces of emotion, of residual heat on the surface of the metal. The image then becomes a tool for listening, a way of restoring the visual's ability to reflect the invisible.

 (text by Vincenzo Montisano)
Project and Photos by Manik Collective (Massimo Mastrorillo and Nicolino Sapio)