He deserves the world, says Constantine Kaloutas, a half-human, half-fan-throated lizard otherwise known as nthromorph. In 2021, the artist received a notification that Rick Owens had donated 5,000 to a GoFundMe account she had created to help subsidise the costs of facial feminisation surgery. He was one of my biggest donors and then he reached out for a photoshoot working together was amazing. Despite never having met before, the duo approach fashion (be it traditional clothing or SFX) as a way to re-think and transgress the human body. Its about liberating people from their fleshy confines and providing them with a vessel for transhuman change.Or, as nthromorph puts it, exploring post-human identity and redefining the binaries of human versus non-human, technology versus nature, and male versus female.
An initial fascination with that vile, membranous prison the human skin led Kaloutas into prop-making, and then into sculpture, and then into costume design, which shed use for online performance art. I like humanising weird, earthling bodies and introducing them to my audience, she says. Inspired by pre-historic life forms, her creations look like the rogue experiments of a mad scientist gone wrong: glutinous amphibians and cross-bred creatures that are neither alien, mammal, nor reptile. Seldom are there eye sockets or breathing holes, but there are plenty of exposed brains and Jurassic tails and cluttered fangs.
But Koulatas mutants are also coy and vulnerable, photographed in kittenish poses on the edge of a lagoon or hidden within wooded thickets. Its like a form of art therapy which helps me deal with gender dysphoria. Its allowed me to integrate the feminine behaviours I had always been suppressing, she says. Before she had begun to medically transition, it was those silicone exoskeletons that first brought Kaloutas closer in line to herself. Every mask was an attempt to beautify my trans body and hybridise with nature. In nature, you are not queer you are just you. I found being closer to a shape-shifting animal gave me comfort. It was a gateway for me to transition and has grown and changed with me.
In this way, nthromorph the Instagram character and the IRL alter-ego chimes with what Donna Haraway was talking about when she wrote A Cyborg Manifesto in 1985. The essay described how technology had blurred the lines between the natural and the artificial and questioned how our bodies can be reborn from the blending of those boundaries. Our perception of humanness has separated us from nature, Kaloutas says. Were disconnected from the rhythms of the land and so weve turned into cancerous organisms. My work advocates for a human body thats interconnected to the earth. Just as Kaloutas has split herself into Constantine and nthromorph, she continues to atomise herself across the ether, reckoning with the limits of her own consciousness via technospiritual and cyber shamanic meme-making.
We are an extension of the whole, she adds. I dont relate to the human experience, I would like to be an animal. But we can no quicker abandon humanity than we can return to a time before phones had cameras: each and every step we take towards technological progress gets etched into stone like a palaeolithic rune. In interrogating the relationship between current tech and past mythologies, Kaloutas work imagines a world where primordial ecosystems and cyborgian futures grow and mutate amongst themselves a speculative place where humankind might be reborn and rescued from staid binaries of nature versus culture and mind versus body. I would like to experience the world through different senses and paint new images of reality, she says. I think Id like to be a shapeshifter forever.
Read the rest here:
Meet the Rick Owens collaborator backsliding into the primordial soup - Dazed
- Upload your Real body to a Virtual Avatar ! - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Transcendent Consciousness for Transcendent Technologies : Part I - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Transcendent Consciousness for Transcendent Technologies: Part II - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Visions of the Future - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Lessons from the Silver Surfer ! - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Playing God in a Video Game ! - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- The Rebellious Voyeur in our Society - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Renewable Energy and the New world - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Chennai Science Festival 2008 - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
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- The latest Cyborg movie ! - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
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- The First "body slaves" : how ready are we for the posthuman body ? - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Realizing our humble place in the posthuman civilization ! - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
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- Touch and Go - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Cyborg Mystic - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Avatar..a great movie ! - January 31st, 2010 [January 31st, 2010]
- Iron Man 2 and the cyborg technology offshoots - June 11th, 2010 [June 11th, 2010]
- Saving the "Humanism" in Transhumanism - June 13th, 2010 [June 13th, 2010]
- Christina is Bionic - June 22nd, 2010 [June 22nd, 2010]
- My recent article in IEET - October 11th, 2010 [October 11th, 2010]
- REASONS FOR LOVE AND HOPE TO OTHER SPECIES IN THE POSTHUMAN FUTURE - February 14th, 2011 [February 14th, 2011]
- Misleading Perceptions of Improving “The Human Condition” - April 10th, 2011 [April 10th, 2011]
- Jean-Claude Van Damme - CYBORG (1989) Part 1 - Video - April 30th, 2012 [April 30th, 2012]
- Cris Cyborg Spinning Back Kick KO - Video - April 30th, 2012 [April 30th, 2012]
- Cris Cyborg Suplexes way to Gold Medal Mundials (BJJ Worlds) 2011 - Video - April 30th, 2012 [April 30th, 2012]
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- MMAFighting: Coker vows Cyborg-Rousey fight - June 4th, 2012 [June 4th, 2012]
- Would Ronda Rousey Beat Cristiane "Cyborg" Santos in a Fight? Fan's View - June 5th, 2012 [June 5th, 2012]
- Ronda Rousey vs. Cris Cyborg: Is the Biggest Fight Strikeforce Can Make - June 5th, 2012 [June 5th, 2012]
- Scott Coker on Ronda Rousey vs. Cyborg: "Cyborg Is a Whole Other Level" - June 5th, 2012 [June 5th, 2012]
- Rousey vs. Cyborg in January? 'She Wants My Arm, I Want Her Head': Fan's Look - June 6th, 2012 [June 6th, 2012]
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- Cyborg Fuel Cell Powered by Brain Fluids - June 13th, 2012 [June 13th, 2012]
- Hugh Laurie - Hugh Laurie To Play Robocop Villain - June 13th, 2012 [June 13th, 2012]
- Hugh Laurie set to play villain in Robocop remake - June 13th, 2012 [June 13th, 2012]
- Hugh Laurie is being lined up to star in 'RoboCop' - June 14th, 2012 [June 14th, 2012]
- CFT: Star recruit Henry decommits from Georgia - June 15th, 2012 [June 15th, 2012]
- Cris Cyborg and Sarah Kaufman Mean Mugging on Fight Promo Video: Fan Reaction - June 18th, 2012 [June 18th, 2012]
- Amped Shows the Downside of Becoming a Cyborg - June 18th, 2012 [June 18th, 2012]
- Is that really just a fly? Swarms of cyborg insect drones are the future of military surveillance - June 19th, 2012 [June 19th, 2012]
- Interior-Decorating Androids, Coming to a Living Room Near You - June 19th, 2012 [June 19th, 2012]
- A message for our cyborg drivers - June 23rd, 2012 [June 23rd, 2012]
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- A Surgical Implant for Seeing Colors Through Sound - July 2nd, 2012 [July 2nd, 2012]
- My life as a cyborg - July 2nd, 2012 [July 2nd, 2012]
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- Cyborg Gaming Mouse - July 5th, 2012 [July 5th, 2012]
- Nightwing And Cyborg Join Cast Of Injustice - July 12th, 2012 [July 12th, 2012]
- Nightwing and Cyborg coming to Injustice: Gods Among Us - July 12th, 2012 [July 12th, 2012]
- See Cyborg and Nightwing in 'Injustice: Gods Among Us' - July 12th, 2012 [July 12th, 2012]
- SDCC 2012: Nightwing and Cyborg Join 'Injustice: Gods Among Us' - July 12th, 2012 [July 12th, 2012]
- NEWS: Cyborg and Nightwing Revealed for Injustice: Gods Among Us - July 12th, 2012 [July 12th, 2012]
- 'Injustice' reveals Cyborg and Nightwing - July 13th, 2012 [July 13th, 2012]
- Human Cyborg: McDonald’s Employees Assaulted Me For Wearing My Gear - July 17th, 2012 [July 17th, 2012]
- Do Not Anger the Cyborg, People! - July 17th, 2012 [July 17th, 2012]