by Matthew Janney and Ian Dull

We need to talk about flesh. Sex is all around us and yet social scientists everywhere are fearing a looming “sex recession”. We want more human-driven technology, and yet the next big tech innovations drive us deeper into virtual worlds. Whereas a sleek minimalism governed our early 21st century aesthetic, we are now increasingly excited by mold, fermentation and rot in our embrace of alternative leathers and skins. What does it all point towards? 

In our work at ReD Associates, where we use methods from the humanities and social sciences to better understand human behaviour, we believe we are witnessing an historic renegotiation of our flesh. How is our relationship changing to the stuff we’re actually made of? What is that doing to our perceptions of beauty, intimacy and desire? And how did we become so alienated from our flesh in the first place? 

As our bodies become ever more intimately intertwined with technology – take the recent launch of Apple’s Vision Pro headset or the phenomenon of human-AI relationships – we might first want to think more deeply about what our bodies really are – beautiful, imperfect, decaying, sublime, perishable things – when we think about designing our future.

Maisie Cousins’s photographs bring us into a visceral confrontation with bodies. Often paired with rotting fruit and flowers or crawling insects, the bodies in her seductive, hyper-saturated images are caught in moments of suspension, transformation and change; a reminder that in the body, as in nature, flux is the only state of permanence.

Alastair Philip Wiper’s images of machines, technology and infrastructure say more about the human condition than the objects themselves. Finding beauty in the unexpected and the accidental, Wiper subverts the idea the functionality and aesthetics pull in opposite directions.

Originally published in Grazia IT