Other Biological Futures: If You’re Reading This, You’re Too Tall

Arne Hendriks is a Dutch artist and researcher, best known for The Incredible Shrinking Man, a critical research project that asks people to consider scaling down to fifty centimeters (about 20 inches) in order to use the planet’s resources in a more sustainable way. Rab Messina, born in the Dominican Republic but based in the Netherlands, is a design journalist. She is working on a research project that examines the role of socioeconomic guilt in speculative biodesign proposals that use the human body as a site or a source of material.

As the modern world has been made for the male, the large, and the western, the fact that Arne is 195 centimeters tall and European, while Rab is 160 centimeters and from the global south, offers a stark representation of their positions on either end of the power spectrum. The middle ground between them is their common vision of the role that biodesign can have in creating a more equal playing field. But the conversation between the two isn’t about the redesign of the body itself, rather it’s about the mental switch that happens right before we think of engaging in a redesign.

For the full article go to Other Biological Futures.