Future Bodies

If you ask ChatGPT in summer 2024 about "future bodies", it will tell you that it is a concept that explores the potential evolution, enhancement, and transformation of the human body through technology, science, and cultural shifts.Future bodies are always simultaneously the product of scientific and technological possibilities and fictional imaginings or speculations.Science and practices of 'fictioning' are encountered in an interand transdiscursive exchange. 1Speculation continues to precede realization, and science fiction narratives and artistic practices find their way into research, just as (bio)technological innovations are incorporated into art, film, literature, and games. 2 Since the late 19th century, future bodies have been understood in transatlantic societies as visions of physical ideals that can be planned and shaped, as well as predictions of horror, which must be prevented.Both ideas of the future are tied to the present and are products of contemporary discourses, problematizations and power relations.In this way, the imagined future makes an intervention into the present, the 'real', in order to offer alternative models of being in the world in the here and now and, by doing so, shape the futures to come. 3 1 Gunkel, Hameed and O'Sullivan in their edited volume Futures and Fictions argue that fiction is an important category beyond film and literature, especially in relation to the possibility of a different political imaginary, which is reflected in the term fictioning (2017:1).2 This has been discussed intensively, especially around the year 2000.Among others: