(IM)POSSIBLE BODIES will guide you along 3 routes through the world of cyborgs, data and artificial intelligence.

Humans and machines are increasingly working together and merging with each other. Think of the technology we use to perform better, become more beautiful or delay death. Cryonics, botox injections, chips under the skin, drugs for the body, pills for the mind, prostheses and wearables in and on our body make us cyborgs. (IM)POSSIBLE BODIES shows the expansion of the body and brain, from pacemakers and smart hearing aids to face filters and digital avatars.

We live in post-human environments. Our desire to perform beyond physical and mental limits and defy death, using every conceivable means, is already making us cyborgs. In addition, what we eat, where we live, with whom and with what we move, determines who we are. Face filters on social media have an effect on our mood and plastics in the environment interact with our microbes and hormones. In the (post) corona era, our digital bodies are becoming even more important than our physical presence. After all, we are often more intimate with our smartphones than with the partners with whom we share our lives and work. And now that we are increasingly hybrid (physical and digital) we live not one but several lives.

VR installations and speculative designs plot scenarios for our future as cyborgs. What do these developments mean? Are we going to use technology to come closer together, come to an attuned consciousness and develop empathy for both fellow human beings and other species with whom we co-exist? Or do we allow ourselves to be owned and picked apart by algorithms reducing us to data, avoiding any, if not all, complicated relationships. Will we fall prey onto the altar on predictability, becoming humans who act like robots, or will we choose to be cyborgs who will do their best to rediscover human values?