April 2023, Statista recorded that 60% of the world’s population have active social media accounts, giving rise to a globally interlinked, constantly changing network of billions of highly personalised, multilayered images of the self. At the same time, emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence and genetic engineering are starting to transform society and the evolution of the human body. Led by multinational corporations, these new developments are far outpacing legislation.
The Validation Junky, a collaboration between PRAKSIS and RAM Galleri, brings together ambitious new artworks and research by British post-disciplinary artist/designer Adam Peacock. At the front of RAM gallery, drawings and video works by Peacock speculatively map possible futures of a technologically enabled human evolution, while the rear gallery showcases a major body of research generated by Peacock in Oslo during his September 2021 PRAKSIS residency Perfection / Speculation. Peacock’s research features thought-provoking video interviews between the artist and four leading protagonists in the fields of new technology, identity, the body and the perception of self: author of The Transhuman Manifesto Natasha Vita-More, Professor in the History and Theory of Architecture at MIT Mark Jarzombek; Presidential Professor at The Graduate Center, City University of New York, Lev Manovich; and science-fiction artist, filmmaker, inventor and body architect Lucy McRae.
Residency partners The Vigeland Museum and queer live events coordinators Karmaklubb* helped shape this research. Peacock’s interviews are staged within the Museum’s dramatic display of works by Norwegian sculptor Gustav Vigeland (1869-1943), reminding that lived experience for both normative and non-normative bodies is modelled by body cultures of the past as well as present and future technologies such as social media, AI and CRISPR/Cas9. The interview questions were developed by Peacock and his fellow Perfection / Speculation residents: Marte Aas, Jonathan Armour, Louis Alderson-Bythell, Trinley Dorje, Erika Stöckel, and Bobby Yu Shuk Pui.
