Body Architecture, Genetic Editing & Self-Transcendence

Lucy McRae in conversation with Adam Peacock

The following video and transcript are edited from a conversation held via video link at the Vigeland Museum in Oslo, on 6th September 2021 as part of PRAKSIS residency 18, Perfection/ Speculation.

2021

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Extended transcript

Adam: Lucy, in an age where we have the potential to edit ourselves in any way imaginable with new and emerging technologies such as CRISPR, what does being human mean to you? How has your local and geographical context affected your concept of being human?

Lucy: These genetic engineering tools throw up the question of what makes us human. I believe that science is on a mission to achieve biological perfection: to remove human weaknesses, vulnerabilities, anything that wouldn’t be seen as a strength. However I believe that those things, the very things that are being put on the line or being questioned as to whether they would be in or out, are what make us human.

I’m living in Los Angeles, where there is huge market research in development around ageing. What does it mean to be a future human? In Hollywood, things get turned around very quickly, and there are also kinds of peripheries of emerging tech going on in places such as San Francisco. I like being in LA because I like feeling alien to where I am. I feel my work can reach beyond normal expectations because when I feel out of my comfort zone, it injects a certain kind of energy. So, I think it’s interesting that I’ve ended up in LA, where a lot of has been going on around transhumanism and related kinds of concepts and labels, but there is also a sense of feeling anonymous within the landscape.

CRISPR technology is so extreme and far-reaching that it requires every kind of character, discipline and job description to come together to discuss the ethics of where it's going. Technology's potential to create ever more evolutionary change is equally horrifying and exciting at the same time.

Adam: What are the challenges of using your own face, body and voice within your work? For instance, does this complicate the process of defining an ethical stance towards applied technologies?

Lucy: I use my own body because it’s a resource that’s here all the time. Having done classical ballet for fourteen years, I'm able to understand the positions that my body can make. The training gives me a kind of innate synchronicity in terms of movement and how it might look in camera. Complicating this is the fact that it only represents my point of view, that of a female white blond woman, and that can be polarising. On the other hand, it is less expensive than casting and working with other individuals. The question has come up: why do I only, or mostly, use my own body? Is that really expanding the conversation around diversity? It is an issue that we’re all having to reflect upon right now.

My response to that is that as artists, we must self-investigate, in the same way that a musician makes music and albums about how they feel and their emotions in relationship to the world. I feel as if my body is a barometer. My job is to interpret the fringes of culture and transform what I’m sensing into physical, visceral, familiar projects, artworks that enable a discussion about the ways that artificial intelligence is going to change how we communicate in the world. For example, we could look at the way AI maps the face. In the case of my [2018] work Biometric Mirror, I use the Marquardt Mask, which was developed by a Hollywood plastic surgeon. The Marquardt Mask is a single-minded equation based on a Caucasian face that to this day gets used in plastic surgery to measure what is considered bio-statistically beautiful. There is no unfurling of that equation for other genders, diverse skin types, races, and cultures, and it is still being used.  As you delve deeper as an artist, you know that the research is heavily weighted. You can watch a movie or see an artwork, but the level of research that goes into getting the work to that point is so multi-layered. That’s also where the juice of the work exists, should you choose to delve deeper.

Adam: Even today, having you inside this space on Zoom is something that’s quite alien, and something that’s almost of its time today. Online communication is something we’re trying to lean into. We’re very grateful that you’re joining us via this technology.

Lucy: I’m so obsessed with the Vigeland sculptures.

Adam: Yes, and actually, we also see you as a sculpture right now.

Lucy: Oh, really?

Adam: You’re within the museum as one of the living pieces! Related to that, has your own perception of your body changed in the course of your biometrics project? In it, you edit digital images of faces across measurable parameters including weirdness, kindness, aggressiveness, introversion and responsibility. Has this shifted your self-perception? I'd also like to ask you what role you think new media plays today, in relation to the body types that we aspire to and try to develop.

Lucy: New media institutions, museums, galleries, and new commissions are all opportunities and platforms to crack open these discussions. How do we move forward? If art, creativity, design and architecture are excluded from that conversation, then the people making the decisions will mostly be coming from genetic, science, engineering and tech backgrounds. When you put seemingly unrelated things into a petri dish, the beauty is that you don’t really know what’s going to happen; you can’t control it. So, allying art with science and genetics injects a momentum of not being in control, and this is the opposite of what genetic engineering is doing. It opens up possibilities. A professor friend of mine at Columbia University received funding to research breast cancer, and within that university they have a full-time artist. This is a great example of how institutes should be working right now, using art to bring in serendipity, accident and intuition.

Adam: This is also the power of speculation. It engages wider audiences in conversations and narratives that might not have been considered before. This is  certainly something you do in your work, which is incredibly seductive and interesting. Let's talk more about disciplines and their function today. You’re currently teaching at SCI-Arc (Southern California Institute of Architecture) in LA. You have a background in both fashion and architecture. What is your vision for the future of architecture, and design disciplines more widely?

Lucy: I’m interested in bringing science to street level and creating a craft, a movement, a membrane, a legacy, a happening where science, art, design and architecture create impacts and are agents for changing behaviour. 

I am very curious to find out how genetic engineering will change the role of architecture, and how that will change the way that we teach architecture. I’m presently teaching prop-making in film and architecture schools, and we’re asking the question of how genetic engineering could change concepts of spirituality in the future. Importantly, the questions that are put on the table at the beginning of a design process are impossible to answer. If a question has a relatively easy answer, I’m not interested in it. We need to start with tough, provocative, challenging questions that require students to get out of their comfort zone. Our making process involves using doubt to design. Traditionally in architecture, you start with reference images and designs and a defined direction. On my course, all that gets thrown out of the window and the process becomes about trust—trusting to the connection that we build in class, and trusting that at some point the narrative that is underway in class and what you’re blindly making at home or in the studio will magically come together. This requires feeling OK with being out of control for much of a fifteen-week course, until around week twelve or thirteen, when things start to come together. What’s ultimately important is the mindset that we are in when we are making.

Adam: Your work is also about attracting the gaze and the imagination of audiences, and so when you collaborate with scientists and researchers, do you experience limitations on your work and your creative vision? For example, do you sometimes find that trying to keep the work scientifically accurate is limiting?

Lucy: I think that one of the beauties of speculation is that you can prototype and map out scientific "what ifs" and ask questions. What if this happens? Do we want it? It's about creating simulations of possibility, conditions of possibility, which is one of the purposes of art. In terms of limitations, our own limitations sometimes constitute the background, and as we evolve as humans, we start to reflect and investigate what those limitations are. Sometimes limitations bring about more creative options than when you have boundless possibilities. The usual suspects are budget, time-scale and pre-existing limitations. However, your question concerns collaborations with scientists and engineers. I have learnt it’s important that, whatever the project I take on, the team that joins me needs to share the vision, so that through risk, we innovate. Otherwise, obstacles are going to emerge early on and deplete the process. To avoid limitation, that shared vision is really important.

In 2016, Harvard Business Review[1] listed the thirty elements of value that a consumer seeks when they pay for a product or experience. The base of the thirty-dot pyramidal diagram includes points such as "makes money," "saves time," "reduces risk," and so on, while the apex—the most important thing that a consumer wants—is self-transcendence. So, if the brief is to make something that is going to enable self-transcendence, what mind state do I need to be in to tackle that intimidating brief? There needs to be a sense of feeling okay when we don’t know; tolerating uncertainty and making a state of mind from that.

Adam: Here's my last question. Using your periscope and developed lens throughout your career, observing bodies and technologies and exploring the future, what do you see for the near future? Where will society, technology and design go next? Maybe most importantly for designers, what big issues will we need to respond to within our lifetime?

Lucy: Taking into consideration this concept of transcendence and going beyond one’s limitations, I am interested in the concept of a collective human consciousness, as a technology to innovate, troubleshoot and problem-solve our ecological crisis. The power of collective thought is that it can cause outcomes in the world, if as a body, machine, mechanism or instrument, we can tune it to a certain state through which it becomes a tool for moving forward in the future, to tackle the really big questions that are in front of us now. My work isn’t about being conclusive, it’s about asking questions. So that would be a question that I am interested in.

Adam: Thanks Lucy for such a great conversation. We have researched your work with love and a lot of curiosity. There’s a lot of food for thought.

Lucy: They were beautiful questions. I can tell that they’ve been thoroughly put together, I appreciate the risks. Thank you.

You can find more on Lucy’s research at www.lucymcrae.net

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[1] Alamquist E, Senior J, Block N (2016) The Elements of Value, Measuring—and delivering—what consumers really want, Available from: https://hbr.org/2016/09/the-elements-of-value