Terrified of the future? These biohacking artists dream something better

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The ancient promise of Los Angeles is that any dream can grow in its fertile climate, even one that looks like science fiction. For a century, the film and the aerospace industries have made possible the unreal here. From mystics to film stars, Pilates instructors and plastic surgeons, self-transformation is an article of civic faith. Lately, however, the city has looked more like dystopian films such as Blade Corredor and Strange daysA burning landscape drowned with police drones, delivery robots and driverless cars. And with Hollywood trapped in a cycle of reset, contemporary artists are producing the most novel visions of the future.

Visitors from Frieze’s latest edition will find a piece of strange technology. Part of the Fair’s approach section, “Theater of Metamorphs” by Xin Liu is a structure that houses a bronze cast from the artist’s mouth. It incorporates a cooling system commonly used to freeze human embryos. Seen closely, emery lips seem surprisingly human and as if they belonged to a completely different species. Liu’s work speculates on the future tangles of evolution and engineering.

For decades, before his death last December, the artist and inventor Pippa Garner fantasized about the chances of becoming Cyborg. Many of his sculptures, such as half human and half human, Rod-Hot “Kar-Mann” (1969), a central work in his recent individual exhibition in the Hollywood Stars gallery, toy with the gender conventions of Auto-Mania and other Machas subcultures, while making fun of the fetishism of American basic products. Garner considered his own body as another technology with which they were handled and his gender transition such as the last work of art, which puts into account a younger generation interested in various forms of “bio-hacking.”

Garner was included in another recent program in Los Angeles, Post human In Jeffrey Deitch Gallery. The exhibition also had younger sculptors whose figurative works were, in some cases, Cyborgs real. The hyperrealist woman in “Pep Talk” (2024) by Cajsa von Zeix (2024) tested a futuristic dune, from Lima, with an accent of Green-Peen with her handlebar arms of the robot. Ivana Bašić adopted a different approach to model the children of the future: their glass, wax and chromium creature that emerged from a fetal cocoon looked like a more friendly version of HR Giger’s designs for Ridley Scott’s Foreign.

Many younger artists are dreaming of new borders for humanity and recognize that the future could easily be a totalitarian nightmare. Greater enough to remember a world without the Internet, but young enough so that it has deeply molded its worldview, they treat technology not only a threat but as a tool for good, if it is placed in the right hands.

A sweet and eartomous aroma fills the air Scientia sexualis, Currently at the Institute of Contemporary Art of Los Angeles, where the artist Candice Lin has installed a machine that emits herbal steam that is traditionally believed to induce abortions. With access to abortion and transgender rights under the attack of President Trump and his technology industry, the exhibition places pseudoscientific attempts to regulate sex and gender under the magnifying glass.

Some works address the issue with medical precision. The “form of Jesus fan form” (2020) form has glass balls injected with melanin and testosterone, which the artist has melted on what appears to be a mattress frame. Covering with white and fleshy pink resin, sculpture suggests that such bodily excretions should be a source of pride and pleasure, despite political attempts to control them.

The “chest rest” by Xandra Ibarra (2020) causes the eroticism of the materials associated with physical disability. A handrail is curved around two folding tables that could serve in a surgery room, while on them, wheelchairs rests have been placed with perforated nipples, turning assistance devices into perverted accessories. The sculptures were inspired by the archives of Shelee Rose and Bob Flanagan, artists, whose BDSM performances sought “fighting disease with disease”, counteracting the pain of the cystic fibrosis of flatagan with sexual pleasure.

Sexualis Scientia It is part of the standard time of the Pacific: Art and Science Cholle, a biennial initiative sponsored by Getty. One of the more than 70 exhibitions participating in Los Angeles is not alone in its critical position. All monitored by loving grace machinesIn view of Redcat, it attacks a somewhat optimistic note: its diverse group of artists use automatic learning to imagine a more tolerant and sustainable world. “Deep time dance” by Kira Xonorika (2024), an attractive and animated Pas de Deux Between an ancestral deity and a hummingbird, it tells the history of origin of the people of two spirits, a third indigenous genre of North America. Another monitor shows “not the only one (N’Too)”, an AI-Ai-Avatar that Stephanie Dinkins cooked in data sets collected from three generations of black women in her family. Counteracting racist biases of great AI, “N’Too” is a reminder that technology channels the perspectives of its manufacturers.

Under an imposing screens built by the Mexican collective artist interested interests, visitors are invited to place Petri dishes with living crops under a digital microscope, which scan and feed them in an algorithm, producing new virtual organisms. It is an intriguing vision of art as evolutionary biology.

The exhibition takes its name from a 1967 poem by Richard Brautigan. “I like to think of a cyber meadow where mammals and computers live together in mutual programming harmony such as the pure water played by the clear sky,” he wrote. The meadows are scarce in Los Angeles these days, and Brautigan’s dream looks like a distant horizon, but these artists insist that it is still worth waiting for something better.

‘Sexualis Scientia’, on March 2, Theicala.org; ‘All monitored by Machines of Loving Grace’, until February 23, Redcat.org; Frieze la, February 20-23, Frieze.com

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