From Elephans Photographicus to the Hybronaut: Artistic Approach to Enhanced Human

This article is written from a viewpoint of a practitioner in wearable technology art whose artistic work, research and interests evolve around the human and technology in relation to localized environments. The author considers wearable technological devices as constructed new human faculties, which impact our perception of a human body and our relation to the world. The viewpoint suggests that human is not separated from his environment physiologically or culturally, but that organisms develop in relation to and interaction with their unique, localized environment. However, humans have departed from an innately-driven biological survival and are increasingly designing their own bodies with new senses and abilities. This situation opens up a series of question and most notably: what kind of relations will form between a technologically enhanced human and a technologically enhanced environment? The paper presents artistic approach to this and other questions. It also introduces the author’s developed prototype known as the Hybronaut. To delineate, the Hybronaut is a concept evolving within the field of the arts. It considers a human as a construct of multiplicity of relations within a heterogeneous network; such as an organic entity that is enhanced by technological and networked wearable devices. In other words, the Hybronaut presents a practical and critical investigation into the merger of organic and technological and its relation to human and his relation to the world.