Inside Out
Published in Collective Hub issue 54, September 2019.
PERFUME pills, SCI-FI salons and ELECTRONIC tattoos. It’s all in a day’s work for a ‘BODY ARCHITECT’. So, what DOES one do – and how did a ballerina INVENT the CAREER?
An artist, ballerina and interior designer walks into a job interview. She gets rejected. A ‘body architect’ walks into a job interview. She lands the role.
That’s the story of how former fashion designer Lucy McRae became the head of electronics giant Philips’s Far Future Design lab in the Netherlands. “They couldn’t hire me because I couldn’t say what I was, I didn’t fit into a category,” Lucy says. “My hybrid background felt like a real weakness.”
She spent a week brainstorming and went back to the company with the moniker of ‘body architect’. “That was what they wanted to hear, they wanted a label,” she says. “And it has enabled me to work in film, music video, wearable technology, engineering, fashion, and graphic design.”
The lab’s role was to look at current technology and social trends and imagine how they might be applied in the future. While the Philips brand might bring to mind everyday items such as lightbulbs and alarm clocks, Lucy was let loose in a lab full of sewing machines and soldering irons to conjure up everything from electronic tattoos that respond to touch, to light-up dresses that change colour by sensing emotions. (TIME named the latter in its Best Inventions of 2007.)
This was back in 2005, several years ahead of the launch of Google Creative Labs – the search engine’s designated team of innovators and inventors.
“The CEO [of Philips] understood the value of bringing art to innovation,” says Lucy. “Essentially, we were creating provocations that could be put out as marketing. Philips had no intention of actually turning a dress that flashed with light into a consumer product, but by creating these disruptive scenarios and sharing them with an audience, we were able to get feedback.”
After four years with the company, Lucy branched off to focus on her own artistic practice – and took her self-proclaimed job title with her (she also describes herself as a ‘sci-fi artist’). As a consultant, professor and speaker her work examines the intersection between technology and the body, and how technology is changing what it means to be human.
Often, her creations take the form of an experience or scenario that is then exquisitely documented in photographs or film. The ideas she plays with are broad and big – themes such as gene editing, evolution, artificial intelligence and space exploration.
She’s also no stranger to blurring the line between the creative and the corporate, and has worked with a massive roll call of big names including Procter & Gamble, Unilever, Intel, Mini Cooper, Swarovski, Aesop and even NASA. She created the liquid-pumping plastic tube outfit worn by Swedish pop star Robyn in her Indestructible video, and became a TED Fellow in 2012 with a video that has now been viewed more than 1.6 million times. The subject? How technology can transform the human body.
As she explained, “I’m fascinated with the idea of what happens when you merge biology with technology, and I remember reading about this idea of being able to reprogram biology, in the future, away from disease and ageing. Imagine if we could reprogram our own body odour, modify and biologically enhance it, and how would that change the way we communicate with each other?”
But while some may say many of her creations have creepy undertones, Lucy’s general outlook on the future is quite cheerful – like an optimistic Charlie Brooker. “I actually met the producer of Black Mirror, and he was like, your work’s been on our boards. That was nice,” she says.
Last year, Lucy was the poster girl for Science Gallery Melbourne’s annual exhibition, titled PERFECTION. In the exhibition trailer, which Lucy both directed and starred in, bulbous, beige pillow people mill about as the camera zooms in on a woman whose face, strapped in a harness, morphs into ‘ideal’ proportions.
The gallery also commissioned Lucy to produce a new work for the exhibition. Biometric Mirror is a sci-fi beauty salon that shows ‘clients’ what their face could look like if adjusted to perfect proportions, and produces a personality analysis by comparing a single photograph with a database of thousands of portraits that have been rated on traits like introversion, likeability and happiness.
A research team at the University of Melbourne, led by Dr Niels Wouters, had created the image database and algorithm. “They told me about it and I was like, this is frightening – yes, I’d love to collaborate!” says Lucy. “The point of the work is to discuss the flaws of artificial intelligence. We discovered that everyone looks the same. Everyone has a tucked-in chin, a pinched nose, an alien, uncanny valley appearance.”
It’s not the first time Lucy has told a scientific story through the lens of beauty and wellness. In her work Future Day Spa, participants were invited to lie on a bed under a silver pressurised sheet, which would essentially vacuum pack them to simulate a hug and ‘induce relaxation’. One person said it cured their hangover; another that it was like being back in the womb.
There was also ‘Swallowable Parfum’, a collaboration with synthetic biologist Sharef Mansy. The ingestible perfume pill altered the fragrance of the user’s sweat. And, in The Institute of Isolation, Lucy created a fictional training facility where the character attempts to optimise her body for life in space.
After a career that has spanned the globe – she’s based in Australia, but Lucy has also worked in the UK, the Netherlands and Los Angeles in the US – space is definitely on her travel bucket list. She has visited SpaceX (as you do) and has her sights set on joining Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa on their first trip to the Moon in 2023 (he wants to invite six to eight artists on the trip and recently started following Lucy on Twitter).
“The fact that he’s smart enough to know to take artists – he gets it,” says Lucy. “And I’d say that he doesn’t need to know what the outcome will be, but he knows there will be an exploration. And that’s what excites me.”
After all, it’s around that time that many predict we will be living in the fourth industrial revolution. And Lucy, for one, can’t wait.
“We are moving towards living in between,” she says. “In between jobs, in between cities, in between genders, in between relationships, truths, knowledge. And I feel like being a specialist will be a disadvantage. With my background being a hybrid, I feel like the only way that we can propel ourselves into this future is to be ‘inbetweeners’ and not specialise.”
As for what’s in store for Lucy’s more immediate future, she’s currently working on a sci-fi TV pilot and a new commercial collaboration. But, for all of her future thinking, Lucy doesn’t plan too far ahead.
“I think that the nature of my work is that it sends me off on tangents that I almost can’t predict,” she says.
“I think the role of the artist is to be curious and just follow your curiosity, no matter what.”
