Ezra H. Murray for Art-Sheep
London-based photographer Luisa Whitton first showed interest in the impact of technology on identity while she was doing her BA in Photography at London School of Communication.
She spent a considerable amount of time in Japan, where she worked with Hiroshi Ishiguro, a scientist who had built a robotic copy of himself. She also worked with other scientists, documenting their scientific advancement on humanoids.
Whitton has been travelling throughout Japan since 2015, meeting robotics scientists at univerisities and documenting their humanoid robots. The result of this documentation is a series of photographs that aim attention at the uncanny life-like faces that were built for the robots.The photographer hopes that her ongoing project, titled “What About the Heart?”, will rebel against the established rules of portraiture and attract the viewers towards “a debate on the boundaries that determine what is and isn’t human.”
Whitton’s pictures are often followed by the transcriptions of the interviews she took from the scientists. In these interviews she questions the basic philosophy under which there humanoids are created, as well as in which ways this creation touches on religion. By doing this, the photographer succeeds in gaining an awareness on the larger question of what it means to be human.
via designboom
