A world where your clothes grow on you? Andrew Shaw explores Super Human.

“Mankind cannot bear much reality,” wrote T.S. Eliot once, and he was right. For millennia we’ve used whatever we can – sex, drugs, art, Nintendo DS – to distract ourselves from existences we can at times feel ‘stuck’ in.

Now technology is expanding our horizons and helping us free ourselves from the skin-line that divides human from environment. A new breed of artists is emerging to explore this new no man’s land. Super Human: Revolution of the Species exhibits 12 artist/technicians exploring the nexus of science and art.

Be confronted by a giant metal invalid walker – with an old Vickers machine gun attached. Brad Nunn’s ‘Machine Gun Walker’ shows how men, now in their old age and needing help to get around, in their prime wielded far more deadly weapons. The walker is the reality, the machine gun a fantasy.

Jill Scott’s ‘The Electric Retina’ is a sculpture of the receptor rods and cones within the human eye. Look into it on one side and see the research, conducted on tiny zebra fish, that goes into fighting human eye disease; turn the ‘lens’ and see what you would see if you had macular degeneration or diabetic retinopathy. Scott filmed underwater at Surfers Paradise to give a zebra fish’s view of the world.

George Poonkhin Khut’s ‘Alembic and Retort’ gives you aural feedback from the heart (yours), along with other layers of sound that alter with your mood. It does this through steel sensors on a table at which you sit, headphones on, eyes closed, feeding back into your own systolic system as if in a loop. The effect is eerily calming.

‘Chameleon’ is Tina Gonsalves’ video art: facing an image of a person on a screen, you find your facial expression, your mood, triggers a reaction in them: sadness, happiness, anger. Are emotions contagious? And who is initiating your shared mood – you or the ‘chameleon’?

Jonathan Duckworth’s ‘Embracelet’ is a beautiful piece of equipment-jewellery designed to test the gripping strength of people recovering from traumatic brain injury. The harder you grip, the more cubes of light-emitting plastic illuminate. Set with gems, finished in surgical steel, it’s what you would expect if Tiffany’s manufactured therapeutic medical equipment.

Then there’s a dress that gradually grows on you – literally. Part of its fabric is the orange bracket fungus, pycnoporus coccineus. Designer Donna Franklin aims to bring us back in touch with nature, to reassociate us with the raw materials of culture.

If after all that you’re still not feeling uplifted, stimulated or amused, don’t despair: take a Havidol. Justine Cooper’s advertising campaign for wonder drug Havidol, marketed as a magic bullet treatment for Dysphoric Social Attention Consumption Deficit Anxiety Disorder (DSACDAD). Watch the TV ads, read the magazine blurbs, buy the merchandise, then take a Havidol that’s been personally designed to make you feel the way you deserve to be. Havidol: When More is Not Enough.

Coinciding with the 150th anniversary of the publication of The Origin of Species, Super Human gives us an insight into a state of being poised between art and technology.

Super Human: Revolution of the Species, RMIT Gallery, 344 Swanston St, City, November 5-December 5, 2009. Mon-Fri 11am-5 pm, Sat 12pm–5 pm. Presented by the Australian Network for Art and Technology (ANAT) in association with RMIT Gallery. superhuman.org.au

Pictured (from top)

1. Chameleon, 2007, Tina Gonsalves.

2. Fibre Reactive, 2004 - 2009, Donna Franklin.

3. Havidol’s campaign targeting men, Justine Cooper.

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