ZONE 5

You have entered the Future Body Lab.

Here you cannot trust that you will leave with the same body parts with which you arrived. New appendages are being developed with mad fury beneath the microscopes and artificial spotlights. Here there is only allegiance to the history of genetic mutations, viral infections, and organ transplants that turn our physical existence into a game of awesome and awful extensions. Here spinal cords are rewired and skin surfaces are grafted into the virtual in a way that blurs the living and the non-living, the material and the immaterial.

You encounter a woman staring closely at a laboratory table. She holds syringes and scalpels; she is suturing one brain into five parallel minds. She is called the Neo-Scientist. Her experiments are something between the sublime and the demonic. She is a master of the molecular, the flesh-wound, and the nanometer.

The Neo-Scientist gives you the following clue below.

Read and choose your future wisely afterward.

Image: David Spriggs, Paradox of Power (2007)

FUTURE BODY FRAGMENT

Regrowth of body parts is regarded as a typical capacity of primitive and unconscious animals, suggesting that our centralized consciousness is incompatible with the proliferation of bottom-up, delocalized assemblies. Will future human bodies be able to spontaneously re-assemble after being damaged, and what will be the impact of full-body regeneration on our experiences of identity and self?

Example: Elysia marginata sea slugs can self-decapitate and fully regrow their bodies from their severed heads. https://www.sciencenews.org/article/sea-slug-detached-head-crawl-regenerate-grow-new-body

Post_014: Rebuild Yourself
by Laura Tripaldi

Image: Haejin Lee, Memoirs of Image and Emotions, Vancouver, 2016

CHOOSE FUTURE

You have read the clue of the Future Body Lab.

The Neo-Scientist turns slowly toward you with a look of curiosity and cutting instrument in hand. She is in need of another subject for her latest incision or malformation attempt.

There are two elixirs on the table that will change your bodily scale. You must either expand yourself to gigantic proportions or shrink to miniature, sub-atomic levels.

WHICH DO YOU CHOOSE?

GIANT

MINIATURE