GUINEA PIGS: A Minor History of Engineered Man

Lydia Kallipoliti, Andreas Theodoridis (Greece, USA)

Galata Greek Primary School

“In the twentieth century, the naturalist explorer resurged in the face of the astronaut and the aquanaut, who could now travel above and below the limits of the earth in regions prohibitive to man’s physiology… Outer space and its corollary regions were places for all that defied property and territorial commitment… In this context, an augmented and engineered type of man was of larger cultural interest, a new universal human subject, augmented through technological instrumentation… The explorer of the twentieth century is a guinea pig, whose body is a test bed… GUINEA PIGS presents such species of engineered men… Either drawn or merely reproduced by architects and designers, these figures illustrate that the line between science fiction and social reality is an optical illusion.” –LK, AT

GUINEA PIGS: A Minor History of Engineered Man brings together eleven historical designed visions of a future human subject reconfigured by technology: Amphibian Man, Exoskeletal Man, Climatic Man, Atrophic Man, Master Man, Excrement Man, Feedback Man, Cyborg Man, Neuron Man, Umbilical Man, and Working Man. Each highly engineered figure is presented through narrative texts, research images, patent drawings and archival material – all organized around an immersive, three-dimensional projection that presents a series of fictional characters.