The Future of the Body: Explorations into the Further Evolution of Human Nature

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Central to the project is the study of body movement in dance: How it can evolve, adapt or re-condition to possible futures? Carmat CEO Stéphane Piat says: “It works like a human heart so if the patient walks, the blood flow increases and if the patient is at rest, the blood flow is stable and low.

Bionic limbs – artificial limbs that use signals from the individual’s muscles or electrical signals from the brain and nerves to create movements – significantly improve mobility and are experienced more ‘as part of the person’s body’.The dancer was envisioned as a force enabling radical redefinitions of modern times—a model for movement away from the cruel optimization of laboring bodies and toward a felt politics that would, ideally, enable a future for all. Through this sociality, we interpret the body as an articulating and listening agent: as both source of, and place for, the formation of knowledge. A choir, an assembly, an ocean—a multitude in constant balancing, as formulated by Hardt and Negri: “an open and expansive network in which differences can be expressed freely and equally, a network that provides the means of encounter so that we can work and live in common.

The individual requires the initial motivation to change unhealthy dietary habits and to revise entrenched sedentary behaviours, followed by continued effort to sustain the healthy lifestyle choices. What the team created is best described as an organoid culture system that generates complex skin – akin to foetal facial skin and hair – from human stem cells. The device is ultimately envisioned to support healing and regeneration of the diseased or injured liver, improving patient survival rates without the need for a transplant. Dance proclaims that it belongs to the sphere of the commons, that it can constitute the wave of joint gestures, of outward movements that become means of communication.

This organ is critical in the immune system and develops T lymphocytes – cells that destroy or fight off infections or cancerous cells. Simultaneously, they began writing about their work with the purpose of articulating the laboring body’s political history, starting in dance, viewed as the engine of this history. Body technology aims to repair, replace, or even outperform our natural body parts, ensuring ever increasing life expectancy. The Future Body at Work is an interdisciplinary score-based study practice initiated and run by Frida Sandström and Kasia Wolinska.

Our positions in the world and our relationships with ourselves and others are defined and transformed from within the radiant body. For instance, if a thymus is grown from the cells of an organ donor, the new thymus could also be transplanted into the patient receiving the donor organ to prevent organ rejection. While our liver has the most extensive regenerative capacity of all our organs, when it is diseased or injured to such an extent that it’s unable to repair itself, patients quickly run out of options.

Through the introduction of the wave, the regime of the straight line, with its temporal linearity, is broken.