Next Generation: Growing technology with Prosthetic X

This story is part of Next Generation, a series in which we give young makers a platform to showcase their work. Your work here? Get in touch and plot your coordinates as we navigate our future together.

With our sensor-filled wired world, digital health becomes a lifestyle. A new beauty ideal, one that artificially makes up the aesthetics of the outer body. But what will the standards of beauty be when the average age reaches 100+ years? Through programming the capacity of the internal, beauty is no longer defined by a deceptive code, but rather by the inner beauty of functioning organs displayed to the outer world.

As human life expectancy is increasing, we speculate on the future of the aging process. How do we want to age? Do we crave eternal beauty? The eradication of death? Can technology turn back the time of the body's aging clock? As technology changes our nature, our nature changes technology along with it. 

A bionic eye offers the vision of tech within the body. An antenna implanted into the skull receives electromagnetic radiation waves. A prosthetic leg picks up the electrical signals from the body. When technology replicates the body, organs become technologically mediated devices. A data organ of tomorrow, a device that mimics the functioning of organs that can collect data and collaborate with technological systems in order to improve life.

As technology pervades inner workings of the body, this techno body penetrates out from beneath the surface of the skin. Artist and designer Isaac Monté, in collaboration with In4Art, created Prosthetic X a mixed media artwork showing how wellbeing can be shaped in our machine-human era, by hacking the aging process with an artificial ‘aura’. An organ that accommodates various prosthetic plug-ins that combat signs of the aging process. 

Prosthetic X refers to a data ‘aura’ organ, strongly reminiscent of a natural organ, connected to nine locations on the body. An extension of the body living, breathing, moving and changing colour. A prosthesis that serves as an aesthetical indicator to overall wellbeing. Each area relates to a specific sign of aging. The aura alters by responding to data retrieved from the three levels of analysis.

The prosthetics are created with smart materials, breathable membranes, kinetic structures, light-sensitive inks and materials, heat-sensitive inks and materials, air-moving materials, liquids and other non-invasive techniques like health tracking devices.

The beauty of technological intervention, fuses the aging process with prosthetic agents. A vision of the body achieving optimum beauty through scientific insight, technological possibility and discourses of ethical assumptions.

Grow old technologically with Prosthetic X.

Meet the self designer: Isaac Monté

Studio Isaac Monté focusses on societal sustainability and material-driven design and research. As a pioneer he combines technology, art and science, to show how art can contribute to a strategy of sustainable development.

So you think you can self design? Get in touch!