What happens to the body when technology is enacted upon it? When it enters our body, once we start wearing it, once we start eating it? It’s a matter that’s becoming more relevant as we turn out to be increasingly intimate with technology, and our bodies are being consistently mediated by machines – what are AirPods, for instance, if not aural implants? Absent of any wires they will sit in your ears all day, eliminating the seam between the body and the machine.

The boundaries are collapsing and it’s these points of interface and instability that artist Lucy McRae is concerned about. Part artist, part scientist, part futurist, McRae created the title “Body Architect” for herself as a option to encompass and communicate all of the areas her work covers. From enhancing personal scent to increasing touch sensation, Lucy’s work uses technology in a way that heightens the physical bodily experience.

Growing up Lucy spent her time between the ballet barre and the running track, a training which informed her understanding of the body and its physical limits. Lucy combined this along with her concerned about science fiction, a mechanism she uses for understanding our place on this planet and where we’re headed, and now works with everyone from biologists to engineers to create her art.

For her most up-to-date project, Lucy created Biometric Mirror as an immersive installation which analyses faces for attractiveness and emotional states, and asks people to query the implications of machine learning, algorithmic perfection, and the hazards they may have for our future.

We caught up with Lucy to seek out out more about her work, how the sweetness industry can incorporate technology into their products, and the longer term of humanity.

Are you able to tell me a bit in regards to the swallowable perfume?

Lucy McRae: The swallowable perfume is a collaboration between an artificial biologist that was looking into smell and pheromone excretion. You understand when someone’s on a date and lift up their arm they’re actually releasing pheromones, sort of territorially marking their area. And on the opposite side of that is that this certainty that technology is getting smaller and we’ll reach some extent when it’s becomes a liquid, when it becomes edible. And so the perfume is a provocation around what happens when technology enters our body – what does it do after it enters our body, can we turn out to be the technology once we start eating it? And so swallowable perfume is a cosmetic pill that you simply eat and whenever you perspire you sweat your individual biologically enhanced fragrance. And in case you could impregnate that pill with color you then sweat cosmetics which entirely disrupts the sweetness market. I get very enthusiastic about that.         

There’s a number of perfumes on the market that say they enhance your smell and that it’s unique to your scent but this is basically taking that to the intense.

Lucy McRae: Yeah, nobody would have the identical excretion of fragrance other than equivalent twins due to the way in which our DNA is structured. So it completely disrupts the sweetness market since it’s a perfume that works from the within out and there isn’t a longer a perfume bottle – the body becomes the atomiser, the bottle, essentially. I believe that the sweetness industry, in the event that they are smart enough, will start aligning themselves with the health and medical world because I really imagine that the sweetness industry will turn out to be a healthcare and medical industry within the not too distant future.

You’ve spoken about attempting to redefine the body as we realize it. Are you able to talk a bit about what you mean by that?

Lucy McRae: In case you take the swallowable perfume for instance, the body has never emitted fragrance before, so if we’re capable of swallow technology then that provides one other program to human skin where we are able to produce a fragrance. In order that’s essentially an example of redefining the body. I created a project called the Future Day Spa. Originally it was designed to organize the body for space travel and that is perhaps quite obscure but our body shouldn’t be fundamentally designed to exit Earth. And as we’re seeing this space privatisation and Elon Musk’s mission to create the Ryanair from Earth to Mars, we want to begin serious about ‘how can we fundamentally change the design of our bodies to exist off earth?’

So I created the Future Day Spa in Los Angeles and we treated over 100 people. On the last day, a client got here in and also you lay down underneath the pressurised sheet and we pull a vacuum across your whole body – we’re principally vac-forming your body – and as he lay there on this very vulnerable horizontal position, and we’re measuring very basic bio-metrics, he disclosed he suffered from Haphephobia which is a fear of touch. He had no physical contact with every other person in his world and I gave him a nine minute treatment where this respiration membrane is making a 360 degree cuddle that’s respiration concurrently your heart rate and when he got up out of the bed, you rise up slowly because what it’s doing is increasing the circulation of the blood around your body so it has all of those beauty applications, and when he got up, out of the bed, he reached out and he hugged me.

Wow.

Lucy McRae: Which was completely not expected in any respect, and so – why did I inform you that story? What was your query?

Redefining the body as we realize it!

Lucy McRae: Yeah so I’m concerned about creating physical immersive experiences which are capable of move people out of any sort of expectation or habit of themselves. Clearly this client completely modified his behaviour on this planet based on this physical experience so I believe we are able to design physical experiences to vary the way in which we behave on this planet which essentially is kind of redefining your body and the way in which that you simply interact with the world around you.

Simply because I’m curious – is that client more comfortable with touching other people now, because the treatment?

Lucy McRae: Alex I so wish I used to be in touch with him! Because I’m not, but from just being at this experience, I can only speculate that it has had an effect on him and his behaviour.

That’s amazing.

Lucy McRae: Yeah it’s crazy. So whenever you hug someone, or when you will have sex or whenever you breastfeed or give birth, you release a hormone in your brain which known as Oxytocin and whenever you don’t have physical contact with someone you’re principally silencing the discharge of this hormone in your brain which they are saying is connected to trust. So whenever you hug someone you create this sort of pair-bonding trust with the opposite person. What I’ve been speculating is whether or not the Future Day Spa, as an immersive experience, is a way of naturally triggering the discharge of Oxytocin within the brain. I believe this is totally related to the sweetness market because as the sweetness market leans a lot closer to and expands into health and wellbeing then treatments just like the Future Day Spa will be developed for social isolation and autism.

So on to your latest project, The Biometric Mirror, what was the inspiration behind it? What were you hoping to find or achieve with the project?

Lucy McRae: I used to be contacted by Science Gallery Melbourne because that they had been working with an engineer, Doctor Niels Wouters, who had developed this algorithm that does two things: it psycho-analyses you, so through facial recognition software it might probably inform you how old you might be, your gender, how weird you might be, how aggressive you might be, how responsible you might be. And the second thing the algorithm does is create a version of what is taken into account ‘perfect’ by a beauty canon called the Marquardt Mask which was developed by a Hollywood plastic surgeon [Stephen Marquardt].

So the Science Gallery showed me this algorithm and I believed ‘we want to create a beauty salon for this and provides people digital facials.’ So I began working with the developers and eventually a man-made intelligence program and turned it right into a sci-fi beauty salon. I believe it’s really necessary that we use public spaces, galleries and immersive experiences, to start to discuss how artificial intelligence will change our ideals of beauty and essentially will change culture.

How do you’re feeling about people saying that beauty will be analysed and calculated by an algorithm or by a machine?

Lucy McRae: To begin with “perfection” in my mind doesn’t even exist. Perfection is something that’s unattainable and what makes us human are our weaknesses, the failures, the mistakes, the accidents that we make. If an algorithm is proposing that it knows the best symmetrical perfect face and we proceed to feed artificial intelligence with these algorithms which are outdated, they aren’t diverse, they’re only applicable to a white male space, then we’re heading down a really unpleasant, mono-aesthetic Black Mirror final result that may strip ourselves of our uniqueness and any sort of traits that I believe make us human.

What technological advancements are you most excited for?

Lucy McRae: I believe CRISPR technology, which is a genetic engineering tool developed five years ago, is basically, really interesting in terms of designing the human body. CRISPR technology is sort of a pair of molecular scissors where you may cut precisely, remove, replace, and delete any faulty DNA. So this technology gives us the actual potential to design human biology, to create and design a baby. That for me could be very exciting but additionally the ethics around it should be discussed and I believe that’s why art and design, architecture, and perfume, and ballet, need to specific science through a creative lens to ensure that us to debate the ethics of CRISPR technology. And I also think optogenetics, this fashion of with the ability to design human experience by treating the brain like a radio. Obviously the medical applications that has are very positive, but once that starts to be hacked you may imagine where that would go as well when it comes to dystopian scenarios.

One last query: what do you think that humans will seem like in 100 years?

Lucy McRae: I actually hope that our future in 100 years is fleshy, visceral, messy, accidental. Because now science and technology are really attempting to create perfection. If we are able to remove faulty DNA, trigger pleasure within the brain, then it’s heading us towards perfection in a non-perfect world. So I’d really hope that we are able to maintain and retain our weaknesses because I believe that’s what makes us human.

Do you think that there might be a backlash against the sterile technological environment that we’re moving towards now? Do you think that people will return to a more natural lifestyle?

Lucy McRae: Yeah hopefully it would be slimy and blobby and visceral and sticky. And I do know that’s very abstract, but beauty and fashion is cyclical and, you already know, so is the economy – we’re buoyant after which we’re in debt. So if everyone seems to be heading towards perfection then you possibly can imagine the rise up of the ugly will are available because people will get bored. I’m running an architecture studio in the mean time in LA called ‘Broke’ and the studio is taking a look at how we’re all broken because we’ve been striving for perfection and so… what can we imagine the following human era to seem like?

Lucy’s exhibition at Science Gallery Melbourne runs until November 3.