Superhuman: Revolution of the Species (review)

The Superhuman: Revolution of the Species exhibit represented a number of important Australian artists working with science and technology. Nearly all the works credit scientists in their acknowledgments, and many works were the products of prolonged engagement by artists in scientific contexts. The exhibit treated a fraught theme: how we should think about technology in terms of the future of human beings and human bodies. The naturalization of this idea, even through the idea of revolution rather than evolution, still leaves considerable problems. In fact, however, most of the selected artists did not address this theme; instead the show was successful in displaying a variety of conceptions of how artists should engage with scientific materials. Works represented potential roles for artists ranging from playing with new technical possibilities to becoming knowledge producers.

Superhuman's installation and the curatorial decision to provide limited text and interpretative materials caused some confusion about which works were interactive. In less than 10 minutes of observation, two different viewers stepped in front of Jill Scott's The Electric Retina (2008) and—experiencing the work in a manner I suspect Scott never thought of—looked at the projector light. While this may have accidentally resulted in some knowledge of the malfunction of the eye, what the oversized projector-eye had to offer was not interactive (and in another context would not have seemed to be). But mixed with interactive pieces and with no text or technical cues to suggest how to distinguish the interactive works, the installation situation turned The Electric Retina into a puzzle rather than a point of reflection on function and malfunction of the body, particularly the eye.

Jonathan Duckworth's Elements (2008) was shown only as video documentation depicting the use of his system in physical therapy: Users play with color and form to improve coordination. The video concluded with a short celebratory media clip about the successes of the piece in therapy. This seems an increasingly common rhetorical strategy for some artists working in new media: News media coverage is sufficiently important to include in the exhibit, so that the work is praised within its own presentation, and simultaneously this points to impact outside the gallery.

Duckworth's pieces demonstrate a potential role for artists that differ markedly from Angela Main or Scott's implicit suggestion that artists working with science and technology might help viewers explore and reflect on the role of science and technology in our society. Duckworth offers instead a model of the relationship between art and science in which artists work in the service of science to deliver more palatable devices and treatments to the public.

More critical, and with a welcome hook of humor, was Justine Cooper's Havidol (2007), a fictional drug campaign, displayed as ad campaign videos, posters and a computer-based self-diagnosis tool, along with a logo hoodie and pillbox. This might best be thought of as an initial exploration for Cooper's much more interesting follow-up pieces working with medical simulation technologies, Terminal (2008), and Living in Sim (2009). However, as one viewer remarked, this parody has already penetrated the commercial market, as similarly marked jars are available in novelty shops. This produced a lack of tension in the piece that softened the critique of pharmaceutical companies' social construction of disease and treatment.

Other pieces, such as Main's Metazoa (2008) and Leah Heiss's Drift (2009), were easier to interpret as interactive. For Metazoa, viewers donned fuzzy hats that enabled the interactivity of the work and encouraged new identifications with other life forms, from single-celled organisms to birds, as viewers controlled these organisms' movements through their own. Heiss's hand-held devices, albeit very much like blue iMac computer mice apart from their texture, did as promised in the catalog, beckoning us to pick them up, and in return offered their glow and sounds, which seemed to vary from user to user. Viewers seemed to understand the inconsistent responses in...