Human futures

The Royal College of Art held a day-long symposium on Human Enhancement Technologies: The Role of Art and Design, of which I sadly only attended the first part. Andy Miah, reader in new media and bioethics at the University of the West of Scotland, unpicked some of the debates around human enhancement, explaining that we all already use many human "enhancements" in our daily lives and that on the micro-level this is entirely justified, but that on a macro level it raises many issues including whether there are ethical limits to medicine. Jon Turney spoke about the history of writing on human enhancement, including HG Wells and Hermann Muller. Antony Dunne, head of design interactions at the RCA talked of students' work on the implications of SymbioticA's art project Victimless Meat. Other speakers were Jens Hauser, Sandra Kemp, Noam Toran and Onkar Kular.

Also this week, the opening of the ICA's entertaining and thought-provoking Double Agent exhibition, which turns the focus onto artists who use other people as a medium: artists curating artists, artists slapping curators, artists filming people making art, artists filming people arguing about art, artists filming themselves watching actors playing the artist commenting on actors playing the artist.And the opening of Cornelia Parker's Chomskian Abstract at the Whitechapel (that I mentioned below), which more than lived up to the promise of the extract I saw earlier. I urge you to see it.

Nicola Triscott, Director