Aliens

The joke goes; “We know there’s intelligent life out there ‘coz it’s not contacted us”.

I am not particularly interested in aliens in the conventional sense - little green men in flying saucers, the certainty that somewhere out there exists a civilisation waiting to explain matters to us - however, my images are speculation on the variants we might encounter and there is pondering to be done.

Although biology will not be their defining characteristic, my figures are biological beings. Their bodies will be neither natural nor artificial as they will have modified themselves repeatedly, generation after generation, until evolution and engineering have become indistinguishable. The portraits I’ve captured are simply current versions of these beings.

In this respect my aliens may not be alien at all.

Humanity’s already on the same path, wouldn’t you say? We repair failing organs, alter genes, outsource memory to machines, and increasingly inhabit information-based rather than physical worlds. The difference is only one of degree. My visitors will have travelled much further down that road and I imagine them arriving not as conquerors but as evidence to humanity that advanced intelligence is not humanity’s sole purview, and, that it doesn’t stand still.

These beings will have discovered that inherited characteristics are not fixed. Intelligence, memory, sensory systems, lifespan, physical appearance, emotional architecture—even consciousness —will have become design options. The organism would still have origins in biology, but biology may not be the only thing determining form. Evolution has imbued some forms of life with the capability to direct their own evolution.

They will have a physical logic, but not one that completely aligns with our expectations.

Do my visitors seem unsettling? Perhaps they should and they offer few reassurances; their forms have been shaped by purposes we don’t easily infer and in environments we cannot know.

Yet the unease reveals more about us than them. Humans prefer what can be classified. We prefer clear boundaries between machine and organism, what is ‘natural’ and invention, and, the visitors may identify in none of these preferences, existing in an entirely new classification.

As I worked on these images, I wondered whether a sufficiently advanced civilisation would still recognise us. We already see identity as being fluid and form provisional. Perhaps appearance will continue to be acted on as being a choice rather than a consequence.

I feel these images are, therefore, more about us than them. They’re fragments from a future featuring humans as both architect and material, where Darwinian understandings of evolution have not withstood human drives to survive - no longer based on something that just happens to a species the longer it hangs around in particular conditions.

Change is something a species does to itself.