Earth has been less habitable during the past millennium as we are moving towards new lands, emerging as hybrids in non-human territories. We have reached as Marshall McLuhan (1964) says the ‘indefinable limits of our own body’ and we fathom the necessity of expanding ourselves in a sensory and bodily context.
Modular Bones™ are sensory augmentation and body enhancement tools exploring new age intimacy in space. They are prosthetic packages enabling and extending human life. Sensory augmentation of the human body is achieved by user-specific data collection. Body enhancement is allowed by artificial prosthetic growth based on 3D-printed mass production.
They are a study on intelligent prosthetic agents developed to serve the demand for endurance, connection and intimacy. This study investigates how these agents are reproduced and what are the networks of care they formulate. Modular Bones™ is a speculative experiment of the impact of prosthetics in new age intimacy driven by unfamiliar spatial demands. It is a means of documentation of the potential social controversies the use of prosthetics may spark off.
Modular Bones™ is an intelligent self-developing system that emerges as a number of practices and symbiotic methods. One would argue that care itself is a living technology (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2018). Artificial intelligence and self-developing systems that support living, could potentially define an overlapping living system calling for self-sufficiency. On the larger scheme of things, this symbiosis could expand in a broader system as a mode of unified living between species, overcoming interspecies hierarchy (Haraway 2016).
Bodies are to be adjusted to live in unfamiliar grounds connecting thought prosthetic agents of endurance, intimacy and care. Habitability hasn’t been more relative, bodies haven’t been more adjustable and their interaction is yet to be discovered.
