The thesis’ study of life expansion proposes a framework for artistic, design-based approaches concerned with prolonging human life and sustaining personal identity. To delineate the topic: life expansion means increasing the length of time a person is alive and diversifying the matter in which a person exists. For human life, the length of time is bounded by a single century and its matter is tied to biology. Life expansion is located in the domain of human enhancement, distinctly linked to technological interfaces with biology. The thesis identifies human-computer interaction and the potential of emerging and speculative technologies as seeding the promulgation of human enhancement that approach life expansion. In doing so, the thesis constructs an inquiry into historical and current attempts to append human physiology and intervene with its mortality. By encountering emerging and speculative technologies for prolonging life and sustaining personal identity as possible media for artistic, design-based approaches to human enhancement, a new axis is sought that identifies the transhuman and posthuman as conceptual paradigms for life expansion. The thesis asks: What are the required conditions that enable artistic, design-based approaches to human enhancement that explicitly pursue extending human life? This question centers on the potential of the study’s proposed enhancement technologies in their relationship to life, death, and the human condition. Notably, the thesis investigates artistic approaches, as distinct from those of the natural sciences, and the borders that need to be mediated between them. The study navigates between the domains of life extension, art and design, technology, and philosophy in forming the framework for a theory of life expansion. The critical approach seeks to uncover invisible borders between these interconnecting forces by bringing to light issues of sustaining life and personal identity, ethical concerns, including morphological freedom and extinction risk. Such issues relate to the thesis’ interest in life expansion and the use emerging and speculative technologies. 4 The study takes on a triad approach in its investigation: qualitative interviews with experts of the emerging and speculative technologies; field studies encountering research centers of such technologies; and an artistic, autopoietic process that explores the heuristics of life expansion. This investigation forms an integrative view of the human use of technology and its melioristic aim. The outcome of the research is a theoretical framework for further research in artistic approaches to life expansion.

With this study, the authors wish to highlight the way artificial intelligence, as a new form of media technology, seems to be ascribed gender, both in fiction and reality. These, by humans artificially developed beings, would not need to be gendered, but still are. Given these beings are human made and new phenomenas, an opportunity of preventing boundaries considering gender, class and etnicity to be reproduced would be possible and in favour. By analysing the Alex Garland 2015 film Ex Machina, the authors wish to discuss how and why the artificial intelligence becomes gendered, particularly feminised, and what this means from a wider perspective concerning the way we look at this new technlology not yet fully introduced in real life. By using post- and transhuman theory mixed with feminist theories such as Judith Butlers theory of perfomativity, Donna Haraways posthuman feminist theory and Laura Mulveys theory of The Male Gaze, this study results in a qualitative text analysis. The methodic tools used in this study contains elements from visual text methods and therefor also semiotics.   The authors reach to the conclusion that the depiction of artificial intelligence in the film Ex Machina (2015) reproduces stereotypic feminine gender acts and even intensifies these. When these ways of presenting new and futuristic technology seems to appear in ficiton, an assumption can be made that they origin from existing and deep gender acts in the western society. Researchers, such as Donna Haraway, wishes for these strong boundaries in gender, class and etnicity to not be reproduced in new technology, but in the fictional case of the film Ex Machina (2015), this wish has unfortunately not been fullfilled. If society would be able to rethink the sharp boundaries between nature and technology and succeed with this ontological change in the way we look at humanity, it would hopefully be easier to approach the new technology with an open mind. Perhaps then the reproduction of gender stereotypes in this new technology would cease in fiction, but also in reality.

Are we cyborgs or humans? This question is at the heart of this investigation, and the implications of it are all around us. In Christian theology, humans are seen as uniquely made in the image of God (imago dei). This has been taken to mean various things, but broadly, it suggests an understanding of humans as somehow discrete from, and elevated above, other creatures in how they resemble God. Cyborgs mark a provocative attempt to challenge such notions, especially in the work of Donna Haraway, whose influential ‘Cyborg Manifesto’ (1991) elaborated a way of understanding cyborgs as figures for the way we live our lives not as discrete or elevated, but as deeply hybridised and involved in complex ways with technologies, as well as with other beings. Significantly, Haraway uses the cyborg to critique notions of the human rooted in theological anthropology and anthropogeny: the cyborg was not created in Eden. This assertion is the starting point of my investigation of cyborgs and humans in theological anthropology. Analysis of this position is broken down into three key concepts throughout the investigation that form the three main parts of the structure: (1) What is the significance of Eden, specifically as a point of origin? What ideas do we inherit from Genesis mythologies, and how do they influence our multitudinous understandings of not only humans, but also cyborgs, that range from the Terminator, to astronauts, to hospital patients? What does it mean to say that the cyborg cannot recognise Eden or even dream of the possibility of return?(2) If the cyborg was not created in Eden, then is it still to be considered as creaturely? How does this figure tessellate into, or challenge, notions of human nature and sin in the absence of an origin or teleology in a Garden? What commentaries of the human as created in God’s image can we compare this to, and how do all of these readings bear on how we see ourselves and technologies? (3) More constructively, given that the cyborg amalgamates the organic and the mechanic, and discusses hybridity, how might this be appropriated by theological anthropology? What does it mean to say that we are hybrids? From these questions, I reflect on tensions between the cyborg and the human, and make suggestions for a theological appropriation of the cyborg figure that takes heed of the emphasis on hybridity by applying it to notions of Eden and imago dei. The overarching aim is to decentre and destabilise the human, and to refigure it within its broader networks that are inclusive of other creatures, technologies, and God.

This dissertation follows an interdisciplinary approach that weaves practice and theory in the disciplines of visual communication, semiotics, cultural studies, linguistics, and new media art. The research methodology is practice-based located within a historical and contemporary context that allows for artistic experimentation and new knowledge to be generated through reflected creative practice This research proposes a context within which society can develop a transcultural means of communication with the objective of gaining completely unambiguous forms of understanding. This research explores the possibility of an open source scaffold for pictorial language that fosters self-enhancing diversity of production models, communication paths, and interactive communities. The dissertation explores research strategies and visual practice in relationship to a proposed global use of a common system of visual semantic decoding that would allow for visual synthesis by individuals from diverse cultural backgrounds. It is proposed that a shared collective knowledge of signs, symbols, and pictographs, supported by the advancement of future communication and information systems, can lead to a visual communication system that will be universally accepted. There is a historic, on-going and collective consensus on the need for a universal language in the near-future posthuman condition. In answer to this need, this dissertation contextualises and goes on to explore a realised case study of a practice-based solution for a universal pictorial communication system. The system may at times seem ambitious and abstract, however, it aims to include all cultures of the world, seeking to establish a direction that identifies and locates cultural similarities over cultural difference. This practice-based enquiry proposes a direction that should maintain coherence, logic, and veracity in order to develop a pictographic communication system that is a valid representation of the human experience in a posthuman condition.

A universal human dignity, conceived as an inherent and inalienable value or worth in all human beings, which ought to be recognised, respected and protected by others, has become one of the most prominent and widely promoted interpretations of human dignity, especially in international human rights law. Yet, it is also one of the most difficult interpretations of human dignity to justify and ground. The fundamental problem rests on how one can justify bestowing an equal high worth to all human lives, whilst also attributing to all human life a worth that is superior to all non-human animal life. To avoid the speciesist charge it seems necessary to provide further reasons, over and above species membership, for why all humans have a unique worth and dignity. However, intrinsic capacities, such as autonomy, intelligence or language use, are too demanding for many humans (including foetuses or the severely cognitively disabled) to meet the required minimum standard, whilst also being obtainable by some non-human animals, regardless of where the level is set. This thesis offers a solution to this problem by turning instead to the significance of the relational ties between individuals or groups that transcend individual capacities and abilities, and consequently does not require that all individuals in the group need meet the minimum required capacity for full moral status. Rather, it is argued that a universal human dignity could be grounded in our social nature, the interconnectedness and interdependence of human life and the morally considerable relationships that can and do arise from it, especially in regards to our shared vulnerability and dependence, and our ability to engage in caring relationships. Care represents the antithesis to the dehumanizing effects of humiliation, and other degrading and dehumanizing acts, and as a relational concept, human dignity is often best realised through our caring relationships. The way that individuals and groups treat each other has a fundamental role in determining both an individual’s sense of self-worth and well-being, as well as their perceived public value and worth. Thus, whilst species membership is not in itself morally fundamental or basic, it often shapes the nature of our social and moral relations. These relational ties between humans, it is argued, distinguish us most clearly from other non-human animals and accord human relationships a special moral significance or dignity.

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