I’m “only” human
“I’m only human” is what you often hear people express. We use this phrase to express our deep unsatisfied feeling of being human; something messy, prone to wander. Often, people don't want to accept the 'shame' of imperfection and try to explain it as ‘being human’. We want to keep pushing ourselves to this image of perfection. This drive has helped us to evolve into the modern humans of today, but leaves us with the question: What does humanity mean in a digital world? In order to attempt to answer this question, my goal is to approach the grey area, the uncanny valley. Experiment and play with the fact that robot technology is not as foreign to us as we think; it is a tool to better understand ourselves.
The human form is liquid, we are poured into molds of expectation, and like the porcelain are forced into unnatural positions. To visualize this distress, I explored the limits of the material. How far I could push the mold and porcelain.
The faces are made of porcelain, and are formed from a liquid. The manipulation of the face illustrates our fragmentation, yet our deep-rooted fascination with the human form. I deliberately chose a face that is not Caucasian, to challenge and criticize the norm of the perfection we strive to, which is based on patriarchy and white supremacy. With each emerging shape, the mold gets rotated manually to explore the boundaries of the material and shape. Layer for layer, I created a 7 pieces mold from the face.
an overview of the defragmentation
So, what does humanity mean in a digital world? I, like so many before me, have tried to answer this question over a relatively short period of time. My research took me everywhere, form a biological perspective (how we evolved from singular organism), to artificial intelligence (some have argued that it is a study on how the brain works). What I came to realize, is that the human form is liquid. What I mean by this is that, no matter how we will continue, we will always rely on the human characteristics/form as a representation of humanity, an eternal pursuit of better understanding of ourselves. The technique that I have developed is a reflection upon the stress that we put on ourselves. The combination of the modern self with the craft of ceramics creates a dialogue.