Andy Miah spends a good deal of his time considering what the future will look like. In the absence of a 21st-century version of Tomorrow’s World, Miah is stepping into Raymond Baxter’s tweed jacket and enlisting artists to envisage cutting-edge technology in ways that more of us can understand.
Miah, a professor in the School of Media, Language and Music at the University of the West of Scotland, teaches courses called Becoming Posthuman and Cyberculture. He splits his time between the UWS campus in Ayr, and Liverpool, where he is a fellow of the Foundation for Art and Creative Technology, as well as attending conferences, symposiums and art events all over the world.
Human Futures, the book he has recently edited, looks at possibilities ranging from genetic dating — checking out a potential partner’s DNA before agreeing to a trip to the cinema — to the development of “assistance” animals, pets that take the idea of guide dogs to a new level.
When the possibilities thrown up in the research laboratory are so daunting and enormous, it’s artists, says Miah, who can give the most abstract concepts a human face.
“The problem with many of these issues is where to start,” he says. “There are no communities based on genetic selection for us to study.
“The evidence dolls the artists created to start a discussion about genetic dating is an attempt to do precisely that. The discussions about medical ethics, bioethics, stem cell research, whatever it might be, are impoverished by the lack of artists.
“It begs the question: who gets to tell the future for us and gets to set the policy that defines that future?”
Art and exhibitions are, he thinks, an ideal way to introduce everyone to some of the more extreme ideas that the future might hold.
“There has been a lot of work done on cyborgs as companion species,” he says. “Well, we already live around and among other species, we have pets who enter our lives in very profound ways and become part of our family. If we want to understand how we relate to other species, we should look first at how we relate to our animals.”
To this end, Kira O’Reilly, a performance artist, recently spent three days in a Manchester art gallery with a pig. “Her exhibition space was literally a pigsty. A pig lived with her for three days in this space. This work explores this relationship with other animals — this is very engaging for young people.”
The less cuddly side of the future is, he admits, harder to understand and even tougher to explain.
“There are clear ways in which that entry point can be achieved but it is a big challenge,” he says. “If you are trying to create cell tissues of a brain that glow in the dark, or bunnies that glow in the dark” — both of which have been exhibited over the past few years — “it can alienate so many people in so many ways. That is why it is essential there is this element of collaboration.”
So will the research labs and operating theatres of the future be overrun by artists and observers like himself, anxious to watch the future unfold in front of their eyes?
This, he admits, is unlikely, although there are encouraging signs of further collaborations. But it is when you mix knowledge and imagination that the real possibilities emerge from the equations and the formulae. The rest, says Miah, is up to us. “We need to make scientists more accountable and expose the biopolitics of science, it’s central to what gets done and what doesn’t and we are providing an opportunity for the public to be part of that process. Science is too political to be left to scientists.”
Human Futures: Art in an Age of Uncertainty is published by Liverpool University Press, £35
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