Humans must become cyborgs to stay relevant.
(Elon Musk)
How would the world look if Elon Musk were right?
In this new, better world it wouldn’t be the robots who rule, but humans with high-tech bodies. While in today’s world, enhanced versions of the ephemeral body are preferably hidden or forced into a humanoid form, the future will be dominated by self-evident and visible extensions, high-tech extremities and sensory systems.
We want to imagine how these cyborgs could look and approximate what could be possible tomorrow: cybernetic hybrid organisms, functionally improved human or humanoid life forms that are among us as a matter of course.
But which functions are worth improving, if we shift our concept of the human condition past the biological realm in order to stay relevant as humans, as Elon Musk suggests?
Ultimately we are constructing simple extensions to approach the Human Cyborg phenomenon.
This event is part of the SySTEM 2020 CREATE YOUR WORLD workshop series at the 2019 Ars Electronica Festival. SyStem 2020 has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme under Grant Agreement no. 788317.
