Someday, maybe not so far in the future, our animals could look very different. Or at least, act very different. Evolution tends to take its time, but Vincent Fournier has sped up the process. In his Post-Natural History series, the photographer has transported us to a time where science, technology and living organisms have all intersected to create a handful of ultra-developed species with highly technological capabilities.
“These creatures come from the future—an imagined future, based loosely on current research on synthetic biology and genetic engineering,” he says. “The idea is that these are living species, reprogrammed by mankind to better fit our environment as well as to adapt to new human desires.”
The creatures inside Fournier’s make-believe encyclopedia look familiar; their futuristic alterations are so subtle that you have to know what you’re looking for in order to see it. Fournier’s Beetle, for example, houses a GPS receiver inside its tiny horn. It’s also capable of secreting a two-layer ABS/plexiglass material, though you’d never know it just by glancing at the bug.
Similarly, the advanced sparrow looks strikingly similar to a typical sparrow, except in Fournier’s world, the bird has unusually good eyesight thanks to the injection of 20,000 engineered stem cells per eye. “Subtlety is the key. I didn’t want the transformations to be overstated, nothing spectacular. It could be a gesture, a texture, a detail,” he explains. “Thus, the viewer is not certain whether these species are real or not, or even when and how they were made.”
In Fournier’s fictional world, the sparrow now has intense visual capabilities thanks to the injection of 20,000 engineered stem cells per eye. Image: Vincent Fournier
The reason the animals look so realistic is because Fournier actually began with a taxidermically prepared specimen. He photographed each animal and then working with a 3-D imaging specialist, he added fictional adaptations and embellishments like the beetle’s antenna or the ibis’ metal legs that can resist extreme temperatures.
Though we likely won’t see a jellyfish that’s able to transmit deep-sea data anytime in the near future, Fournier did do his homework. The artist worked with synthetic biology specialists and speculative designers to figure out what could actually happen in the future, given our changing technology and environment. “And so I became interested in the idea of exaggerating the present in order to create speculative fiction,” he says.
Much of Fournier’s work straddles this line between reality and fiction. By mining the creative bits of science, Fournier is able to create something just fantastical enough to make you question what’s real. In a particularly disturbing entry in Post-Natural History, Fournier imagines a feline species that is capable of influencing the physical world by psychokinetic powers like memory manipulation, ESP and psychic persuasion. And you thought cyborgs were creepy.