We are living in an absolutely incredible era. Even if you just observe all the changes from the outside, it still looks quite exciting. Sometimes even a little comical, or tragic. Our civilization is only beginning to form into something meaningful, and all this is happening unevenly, so problems arise, of course. As an artist, I am most interested in the aesthetic aspect of these processes. The feeling of beautiful/ugly roughly corresponds to the instantaneous reaction of our neural networks to some unknown signals, to something we haven't encountered before. Simply put, this is how we perceive entropy.
Since we are a form of life that has neural networks capable of somehow making sense of things we have never encountered before and adapting. Plants, for example, can have quite complex behavior, but new reactions arise in them only randomly, through mutations. Only in subsequent generations. And now we also have artificial neural networks with amazing capabilities — I find this very encouraging. Soon, neural interfaces (brain-machine interfaces) will be added to this. I confess that I am very interested in what our pets will tell us. I think something will certainly come along for them too, I hope.
All of this together, I think, will finally help us to better understand this universe. Currently, as you understand, we live on a rather unique planet, on its very thin surface, and our vulnerability is growing over time. And it will grow even faster if we don't try to make our existence more reliable. We seem to be doing this, but, they sometimes say, that if the changes are accelerating, you must also accelerate to simply stay in place. And to accelerate, you need some bait: we are very effective in running after something if we believe that the goal is worth it.
And here I see, in fact, the role of art. I think we need to look for a new aesthetic that will make this run enjoyable. In these images, you see our space colony project. Together with my friends from "tonux.gix" we have been developing it for more than ten years. Many people knowledgeable in this field say that we should create new objects in the interplanetary environment. We can certainly use planets, asteroids, and so on, but for a stable life, we need something less random and more reliable — this sounds quite reasonable. We also used more colors in the images than we usually see in space with just our eyes. Astronomers often do this, reflecting invisible ranges onto ordinary images with colors visible to us. This is truly fascinating, astronomers can, in essence, assess the chemical composition of cosmic bodies at incredible distances, from the colors.
Currently, it's still unclear whether we will actually live on such artificial space objects at some point in the same way as we do on Earth. There are wonderful projects for something similar, people have dreamed of this for a long time. These were truly romantic projects, in the positive sense of the word, and entire cities were planned there. But now I'm not so sure if they will actually look exactly like that, as it would be very, very expensive. Also, these artificially created objects themselves will probably resemble some lifeforms more than the mechanical devices of the past. Moreover, building cities in space wouldn't make sense because we are gradually moving towards modifying our bodies. Currently, this is still a very delicate issue, but I think we are already heading towards it. Judging by everything, this will begin sooner than we embark on space colonies. This promises a truly significant increase in lifespan that would be unattainable in other ways, if we're talking about thousands of years or more. From my own experience, I can tell you that true life begins precisely at the end of our physiological capabilities, so we will all ponder this, sooner or later... I just wanted to share my dreams with you. Most of the ideas were taken from many different sources throughout my entire conscious life. I mean both serious scientific works, from Euclid to Bostrom, and works of art, from poetry to films. They say that modern futurism, to be a science, must use the most daring science fiction, and just check what really makes sense from it. And whether it will become real is no longer so important, because if we have enough time, we can still invent something else. Incidentally, a rare phenomenon is currently happening in the Solar System, which helps to feel the eternity of space — the planetary parade, 7 planet conjunction
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