The cultural concepts of identity, life and nature are under constant negotiation. The world have been defined as; the given (nature) and the constructed (culture). Without this constructed dichotomy it is more complex. Nature and culture mimic each other’s qualities and as transparencies can hardly be differentiated as they can act and feel alike.¹ Autonomous (hu)man made system have become so complex that we start to perceive them as nature. Although we can not trust our means of technological saviour we deny technological advances its “natural” aspects: mortality, fragility, complex interactivity and dependence on flows of energy and material sustenance.²

Altering nature is central to humans and the more we learn to control it the more it loses the natural character and enter the realms of culture. Everything is co-evolutionary a copy of a copy and as a designers and artists we must use what has already been shaped. Perhaps success is manifested when we alters existing forces and work counter cultural. Or amplify the directions we are currently rendering. Is it time to reverse our concept of not what is possible and what isn’t, but to accept the impossibility of omnipotent immortality? The world is largely messy and it is not possible, nor desirable, to know what is going on, instead we should be certain that we don’t know and learn how to feel from uncertainty, to try to make sense on how to navigate.³ Preoccupied caring for ourselves affects the strategy for survival for both humans and non-humans in this entangled universe.

In our present technological reality of conquering the biological, this speculative project is in reference to the uncertainty of our future and the brutal advances that shape human minds. The crisis of being human in the surrealism of our culturally altered nature. The fear of a lost world and our need to reinvent ourselves. A reflection of the contiguity of life between species. Telling the story through an artificial enhancement strategy for solidago canadensis it is about the human hubris worldview and the unique and often troubling realities of the present and the conventional problem-solving/ truth-seeking of the messy, unstable, in flux complexity of nature and culture.⁴

Living in the extreme times of the weird and wonderful times of nanotechnology, synthetic biology and neuroscience it is now longer about designing the things in the environment around us but designing life itself. Our advances and innovations have huge consequences on what it means to be human, how we relate not only to each other but our coexistence in this sphere.

[1]The posthuman, Rosi Braidotti, 2013

[2,4] Next Nature: Nature Changes Along with Us, Koert van Mensvoort, Hendrik-Jan Grievink, 2012

[3] Lilla drevet podcast, episode 182, 2018