Sci Fi Artist Lucy McRae Uses Her Art to Predict the Future

For self-proclaimed science fiction artist Lucy McRae, every gallery is a laboratory. She’s fascinated by the future, and wants to predict it through pushing the limits of technology in creative ways that encourage viewers to become active participants in bizarrely beautiful experiments. Some of the Melbourne-born and London-based futurist’s creations include Future Day Spa, where audiences were placed in a vacuum chamber to induce them into a weightless state of relaxation that could theoretically prepare their bodies for space travel. Another, Swallowable Parfum, mixed genetics with cosmetics as users swallowed capsules that allowed their skin to excrete a unique odor determined by the individual’s environment and DNA. She’s also created artificial skin for pop star Robyn, and designed wearable garments that change colour according to the light.

Speaking to The Creators Project, McRae explains how art and innovation go hand in hand. Technological progress requires a lot of creativity, although it’s sometimes easy to forget this. “If you allow for chaos and art early on in an innovation process you open up to bigger areas of research beyond your intended goals,” she says. “For me, what it means to be human is to be an explorer, to get out there and try and understand the world. I think I use my artwork as a way of understanding what’s going on—specifically in the areas of science and technology—and as a way of encouraging a public to have an opinion on scientific breakthroughs, specifically the areas related to health and the body.” McRae’s artworks and performances act as prototypes that she can test on the public: predictions for how society might work 10, 20 or 100 years into the future. “You’re able to correlate the future more accurately when people have told you whether they like it or not,” she explains. “You’re able to understand the cultural impacts and then build, create and design a technology that has more relevance because you’ve prototyped it and tested it. I like to use the gallery as a usability test where the audience members become the testees."

Audiences who experienced the Future Day Spa helped provide a glimpse of what the future might be like—and it’s looking bright. Some participants said that it eliminated their hangovers, whereas one man—who had suffered from a lifelong phobia of touching others—found himself so soothed by the experience that he was able to hug McRae afterwards. “Now I’m speculating whether similar treatments could be developed and used to treat social disorders,” the artist says. She wonders whether the day spa triggered an oxytocin release that enabled the man to temporarily overcome his phobia, and is eager to explore further.

Perhaps art cannot give the immediate quantifiable answers that science sometimes can, but in many ways it’s a more accessible and tangible way to understand a society—and hint at its future. It’s also a useful tool to explore moral ambiguities and ethical questions with nuance. Ethical dilemmas aren't what drive McRae, but she certainly encounters them.

She's fascinated by the potential for DNA sequencing technologies, and the potential for humanity to bring about its own evolution ahead of nature, and wonders whether humans will be able to modify their genetics not through DNA sequencing but rather through the physical experience of a certain environment. “I’m trying to think about creating extreme experience and how that could affect human driven evolution,” she says. She’s also obsessed with the potential of space travel, robotics, and wearable exoskeletons and prosthetics that extend human capabilities.

All of this has the potential to happen in the gallery. “I think in such a visual and textured imagery,” McRae says. “I see things in image as opposed to words, taking stuff out of the lab disseminating it into the world as something more touchable and tangible.”

It’s enough to make you wonder why we bother with those boring labcoat-wearing scientists at all.

You can watch Lucy McRae in our Visionaries video here:

This article is presented in partnership with IBM

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