Avatars, filters and digital identities: Nick Bostrom, director and founder of the Future of Humanity Institute in Oxford, defines a "post-human" as a " being that has at least one post-human capacity. By a post-human capacity, I mean a general central capacity greatly exceeding the maximum attainable by any current human being without recourse to new technological means. "
In a post-ideological age, it seems that the question of identity is the only remaining collective theatre where the shared hopes and anxieties of Western society can be staged, becoming the prism through which contemporaneity is analyzed, understood and invented. Male and female, along with every other category that might once have seemed unshakable, have suddenly become obsolete and reductive concepts that are leaving space for unprecedented fluidity.
It's therefore inevitable that this porosity in all boundaries equally applies to the definition of humanity. If post-humanism has been a playground for academics, techno-utopians and sci-fi enthusiasts for years, we have reached a point in the history of humankind where this term is losing all its vagueness and materialising in an increasingly real - and impending - Possibility.
In this age that Roberto Calasso defined as the "unnamable present" - whose only distinguishing feature seems to be its radically elusive character - genetics and biotechnology may soon be able to take human nature to its extreme, altering it to the point of potentially spawning something completely different and undefinable by today's standards. But this approaching horizon is already a reality for a whole series of contemporary artists - at least in their images.
Whether it's a utopian or dystopian universe, 3D modeling or silicone implants, whether they use analogue or digital techniques, a new iconography of the idea of being human is taking shape. In that outlook, which is not entirely decipherable, even concepts like gender, man and woman seem to have lost their relevance. And these artists, with their humanoid creations, are among the pioneers exploring and expanding the boundaries of this idiom.