My name is Lucy McCrae, I'm a body architect and right now we're in a boat at Lime Morph
in London.
A body architect is a speculative storyteller, I trained in classical ballet so inherently
everything starts with the body.
Part of what I do is looking at how technology will or could transform the body in the future.
The starting point of all my work is based on an emerging technology that exists, it's
not science fiction but I use the tools of science fiction and storytelling to take that
existing technology into maybe a fantastical provocative different area.
I always kind of approach quite complex scientific challenges in a playful way.
One example is a swallowing perfume which I invented which is a cosmetic pill that
you digest and when you perspire the fragrance comes through the skin surface.
I was looking at how in the future we'll be able to reprogram biology away from disease
and ageing and smell and pheromone excretion so I layered these different concepts and
was interested in how we could genetically manipulate our body odour to create something
that was biologically enhanced.
Another project that I did was a short film called Make Your Maker which started with
the premise that the food and the body are inseparable.
There was a woman who was mixing body parts as if she was a chef mixing gender and identity
with liquids and it's looking at how in the future we will absorb technology from the
inside out and enhance our senses by eating ourselves.
For Dazeen and Mini Frontiers I'm keen on exploring how the body now could start changing
in order to withstand long periods of time and space and that's what this project is
looking at is prepping the body to go to space.
This project was triggered by two conversations that I had with two independent people from
NASA.
One was Lynn Harper who's a space biologist at NASA Ames and the other was Alexander McDonald
who's an economist at NASA who talked about the importance of telling stories a hundred
years from now and how storytelling propagates innovation.
I met a guy who is an artist working at NASA in the Jet Propulsion Lab so already artists
are working with NASA missions to kind of speed up the way that they're evolving.
I'm planning to create a cinematic experience similar to some of the films that I've made
but in this particular example you'll be able to become one of the characters in the film.
I know that astronauts who come back to Earth suffer an extreme osteoporosis because there's
no gravity for bones so the idea is it's going to be a very kind of clean laboratory
and you get under these kind of golden aerated cocoons and slowly the air is sucked out of
these pockets and it's just hugging your body from every kind of angle and the experience
for everyone is going to be completely different but in my experience it's a very calming experience.
It's going to be weird.
I don't know if you want to put that on the air.
