or intelligence or memory or physical abilities… and the issue here is: for you to develop such an ability at that time, you would have to be born with a genetic code assembled in accordance to the purpose, so for example my parents would have to decide from the conception of my DNA what do they want to enhance in me. Henriette Vittadini: In this work the prototypes you designed have a much more aggressive “looking”. Does this sort of visual violence represent the violence we can address against ourselves in our quest toward optimisation?
Now, the ethical implications, as you can imagine, are immense because as I grow up to be special and in some way distant from normality, I inevitably become this kind of freak of nature because I have been fitted with this special “kit” that allows me to perform something better than anyone else, which in a way develops my status -my ego- but also destroys my integration capabilities. Therefore, is it right for parents to be able to impose this kind of things to their children?
Mikael Metthey: There’s a bit of this aspect of self-mutilation in the way in which you to prepare to make drastic changes to improve yourself, as plastic surgery for example, where you can decide to completely change the image of yourself to the others; in another way you also have the clear distinction of yourself by performing these acts, by wearing these devices that look quite brutal, as you said, and make a bold statement about your wish to become normal and in this strange act you are communicating the very basic aspect of the project which is ‘what would it take for me to be normal and what do I have to tell to others so that they think of me as normal?’.
The scenario I’m giving is a moment in time where the persons that have been engineered realize that this is not what they want to be in life, they want to be normal, and that’s where the design comes in, and creates the structures and the tools to allow you to level yourself to normality by therefore also making a strong statement to the others: that you are making an effort to hinder your qualities so that you would be able to fit in.
Henriette Vittadini: The question 30