The recent push by a circle of my friends to produce more anarcho-transhumanist imagery has gotten me thinking about the paucity of aesthetics in the broader transhumanist movement.

Frankly—if we’re going on aesthetics alone—I’ve found most of what’s produced by transhumanists to be quite repelling. This is kind of understandable though. Transhumanism has long existed in an awkward state. We’re not really a traditionally evangelical sort of ideology, or an ideology at all really. Believing that physical/technological freedom is important is hardly a political platform, valuing scientific research is not really a traditional call to action, and so it’s no wonder that when some decide to make glossy brochures they so often come across as awkward imitations. The ideologues of those perspectives we’re at odds with have a lot of experience in the dark arts and in comparison we often come across as naive dilettantes.

But there’s obvious value to memetic outreach, if only in passive self-presentation, and aesthetics has a large role to play there. So far most of what little transhumanist aesthetics there is to speak of has been basically copy-pasted imagery from dated cyberpunk and 50s shiny futurism, effectively just littering around the 2010s equivalent of clipart.

While I sympathize with the occasional necessity of such steps when tackling abstract conceptual matter (one can only reproduce so many pictures of Stellarc’s arm or overlaps of brains and circuit boards), this approach too often uncritically inherits the untranshumanist problems of those sources. In particular the oldest transhumanist visual trope is the impecably plastic android body, a trope that apes our present culture’s awkward notions of beauty. Notions strongly tied to an artificial and constraining normality. The poised GAP model aesthetic isn’t just hella problematic for social justice reasons, it’s totally ridiculous because all the historical data on the social construction of beauty norms and constant individual deviations suggests it’s far easier to mentally / neurally hack what attracts us or our notion of beauty than it is to physically remake the world to fit current arbitrary notions. Transhumanism is about freedom and evolution; transhumanist aesthetics should necessarily focus on deepening the wild diversification the information era has brought on, rather than everyone converging on a plastic mail order bride aesthetic. In fact I would argue that most on-point representations of transhumanist tendencies today are the diversities and hypercomplex meta-riffing on fashion and the like found in radical queer communities.

Similarly there’s a huge focus in transhumanist media on clunky robot bodies or obtuse cyborg implants. But this is not at all how our technology has evolved. We all carry implants right now, whether those be glasses or clothing or smart phones or cochlear implants. Form, function and simplicity are incredibly important and intersect in complex and fascinating ways. And yet artists seeking to represent transhumanist visions seem happy to abstract away from grappling with any of these considerations, a tendency that seems all too reflective of the common critique that transhumanists are more interested in the fantasy world than anything serious.

Of course a lot of this has to do with the aesthetics that warfare, policing and other forms of institutional violence have accumulated. So many depictions of technology or the future are oriented around the sort of narratives our present society finds engaging, particularly those involving violence. Search for “cyborg” or the like and 95% of what you’ll find will be characters holding guns. Representations of transhumanist currents in media are almost exclusively tied to stories involving the police or military rather than the vast diversity of alternate but important and excitement filled lives people have or can have in a world of greater technological freedom and abundance. Getting serious about the future means not treating it like a backdrop for a first person shooter.

In the same vein, little depiction of cybernetics focuses on something other than the obtuse *hardware*. This is frankly rather disgusting. We’re right now building this amazing world of the mind. Transhumanists are the internet’s greatest champions, its radical vanguard and yet all we can conjure for depictions is the equivalent of pictures of usb cables and people’s laptop shells? I get all tingly at a sexy picture of a brain jack like anyone, but we should be trying to use abstract visual metaphors to emphasize the rich and enthusing informational content to the world we’re describing, not its casing. The vast vast diversity of novelty and tools and agency the web provides deserves some ecstatic art. Just search for mathematically generated or inspired art if you have no idea where to start.

When people do move beyond depicting hardware shells they tend to get very lazy with their GUIs. Just monocolor wrap-around holograms with a bunch of shapes and faint font. I’d love to see someone actually try to use the GUI itself to depect the awesomeness of the future. Think about the amazing programs you’d be using, whole new ways of interfacing with your body, devices, society, etc, and depict that explicitly! We should be doing futurism on what data visualization can look like in the future, what GUIs would look like in the future. Every painting of a cyborg involves undertaking futurism regarding the hardware, let’s do a little futurism on the stuff that really counts.

Speaking of hardware, though, what in the hell is responsible for so little imagination when it comes to genetic or biological enhancement. You can’t just graft on tentacles or cat irises and pretend that’s a useful or likely augmentation.

Transhumanism is about unleashing a cornucopia of possibilities. Why should our aesthetics cling to the same old gritty cyberpunk, gothy industrial or the glossy white Boeing/Apple pamphlet. Let’s see some cheery color! Let’s see some earthiness! Let’s see some utterly drab normie practicality! *Something* outside the same old boring archetypes. Someone in some pastel single-piece highly functional silk outfit that’s just a little frumpled and starting to fade at places. Chuck on a single bandoleer of tech bits and some practical things like a normal water bottle. Throw them in an overrun garden bursting with green and color. Now wrap around one of those ridiculous but delightful giant hologram GUIs. And give them the equivalent of popup notifications and a terminal and a CAD designer and a graph of protein productions. ...You get the idea.

This brings me to my last major point, yes there’s a place for the future to be avant garde and fantastical, but it also needs to be accessible. It needs to scream possibility, not just the same ol’ same ol’ highly retread subculture. It needs to be open, not cramped and stagnant, but it also needs to be organic and practical. When people look at city scapes they sometimes are impressed by the sweeping grandeur but they also sometimes shrink from the brutal prison aesthetic. No one looking at a transhumanist future should miss the rich soft lush complexity of a forest. Our world should be MORE organic than organic, more soft and complex than nature can presently sustain. Our future should be strictly better than any alternate, with every possible positive trait in spades.

This isn’t even getting to visual representations of what it might be like to be in different sorts of hive-minds or loosely telepathic collectives.

The recent fashionableness of things like space prints and holographic sheen points to a kind of subtle optimism and excitement about the future creeping back into people’s minds from all the ways the internet is deepening our experiences. We should be stoking this, meeting people where they are today rather than staying exclusively off in the clouds. Transhumanism is an imminently practical and desirable stance in the here-and-now. Struggles for body autonomy, for essentially morphologogical freedom, are no better seen than when it comes to things like contraception and hormone therapy. There are a great many practical everyday instantiations of transhumanist tendencies. It’s not enough to emphatically support these struggles; our outreach, our self-representation needs to show the more radical path forward by starting at the accessible or realistic, rather than rehashing genre tropes or focusing on irrelevant trappings.