Regarding devices that augment or replace the body, Mana Kikuta explores sites where robotic devices are developed and tested. At this scientific research facility, she focuses on moments of training involving a person wearing a specially developed prosthetic arm. The athlete is practicing to compete in an event at Cybathlon, a competition aimed at improving assistive technologies for people with disabilities.

Through a time-trial race, the work captures the beauty of everyday movements made possible through technology. At the same time, it juxtaposes this with the bokeh of photography—which itself is a tool that can augment or replace the body—creating new possibilities for living with this absence.

Pascal Beausse

In Fleurs, a series of Polaroids, three layers of color are added to the same photosensitive paper through three successive exposures, using red, green, and then blue filters. By decomposing light with three RGB filters one after another, rather than simultaneously, the work restores a sense of time to the three-part photographic process, which today takes place simultaneously with each press of the shutter. The movement of the flowers reveals the passage of the wind and the time elapsed between the colored layers. Through these shifts, we come to understand that the color of photographs is an interpretation—a vision shaped by our technologies—and that photography enables us to see the world differently. In the interstices between the colors linger the ghosts of the technical history of images, as well as, perhaps, those who wander through fields of wildflowers.