Art Sonje Center presents Tyler Coburn’s Artist Talk, Ergonomic Futures at Art Sonje Center, Parallax Hanok.

Ergonomic Futures is a multi-part project that asks questions about contemporary “fitness” through the lens of speculative evolution. The work comes out of Tyler Coburn’s interviews with paleoanthropologists, ergonomists, evolutionary biologists, and genetic engineers. To each he has asked: What are future scenarios for imagining new types of human bodies, and how might this thought experiment reframe conversations about body normativity in the present day?

Coburn has developed a lecture about these topics, and he will discuss genetic engineering, the founder effect, postplanetary living, and other things that contribute to marked differences in how we biologically, philosophically, and legally define the “human.”
Ergonomic Futures takes two forms in addition to the lecture. First, Coburn and New York architects Bureau V have designed functional ergonomic seats for different future bodies, intended to serve as museum furniture. Second, Coburn has collaborated with designers Luke Gould and Afonso Martins on a website of short stories (www.ergonomicfutures.com) meant to evolve over the years. New stories may appear, and existing stories may be edited or deleted. A given story can have one or several versions that change in quantity over time.

About the Artist
Tyler Coburn is an artist and writer based in New York. His work has been presented at South London Gallery; Kunsthalle Wien; CCA Glasgow; Western Front, Vancouver; Grazer Kunstverein; UCCA, Beijing; and Sculpture Center, New York. Coburn
participated in the 11th Gwangju Biennale and in the 10th Shanghai Biennale. His writing has appeared in e-flux journal, Frieze, Dis, Mousse, and Rhizome.