Human +

In the foreground Sean is running the Free Will Lab in the Gallery, collecting data from visitors for an experiment about the Dopamine receptor D4. In the background you see the striking 'If not now then when?' sculpture by John Isaacs.



Area V5 by Louis-Philippe Demers formed a long array of robotic heads that follow visitors with their eyes as they entered the gallery.
Image courtesy of Zoe Papadopoulou



Laura Allcorn exhibited the Human Pollination Project which "brings attention to the human reliance on the pollination services provided by honeybees. Honeybees provide pollination for over one third of our food supply. What if humans had to assume the pollination responsibility from the honeybee?" In the background you can catch a glimpse that shows one of eight beautiful prints from the Human 2.0 series by photographer Yves Gellie.



This project is called My Robot Companion by Anna Dumitriu, Alex May, Prof Kerstin Dautenhahn and Dr Micheal Walters. They ask "What will we do when life extension technologies become the norm and we enter an age when there are no longer sufficient numbers of young people to care for the ageing population?" The project explores what kind of android robot head people prefer, including potentially a mirror image of yourself.



Here I designed the plinth specifically to display four books in a deliberate way to enhance this small, but beautiful work. From the stork to the invention of the microscope, the ‘birds and the bees’ to IVF—Reproductive Futures by Zoe Papadopoulou explores the question 'Where do babies come from?' in a series of childrens books for an era of diverse reproductive methods.



The Center for Post Natural History exhibited Strategies for Genetic Copy Prevention
"If life does anything, it makes copies of itself. It is one of the traits every living thing shares with every other living thing. Since the dawn of agriculture and animal husbandry, humans have developed increasingly elaborate strategies for preventing this self-copying behavior when they view its product as undesirable. The reasons for doing this are as numerous as the means by which it is accomplished. Included in this exhibit is a small selection of strategies of reproductive control that have been developed and used in modern times." CPNH



This calmer and more subtle section helped create a visual balance within the exhibition. It shows the elegant glass works Pleasure/Pain, Capacity and Process by Annie Cattrell and the delicate video Aphasia Mechanica by Danny Warner.



Obilique are large, impressive prints by Nina Sellars documenting the surgery that Stelarc undertook to implant an artificial ear scaffold in his arm.