My art in longevity

Longevity is just as much a cultural phenomenon as it is a medical one. In my own artistic practice, I have been interested since early childhood of a materialist approach to the body and the possibilities of its utilitarian modification; I had already explored these ideas in the visual arts even before my career in film.

My more recent works, both in painting and film, are consistently centered on the direct optimization of the body. My film Age of Empty Cemeteries portrays the success of cryonics and the conquest of death and disease, while my painting DNA Taken in Hand (2025) suggests that we may shape our own genetic structure, achieving an ideal of humanity elevated to a classical, Greek demi-god-like level—immortal in a way that classicism could only dream of. My cultural mission is to plant the desire for radical life extension within both high culture and popular culture; I possess both the experience and the tools to do so, supported by a substantial body of work.

Concrete bodily elements continue to appear in several of my earlier works, and throughout my film career, the experience of pure physical existence has become a recurring motif. In my 2017 animated short film Mucus, a human illness is still depicted in an empirical manner, whereas my 2020 experimental short Feast of the Condor presents radical life extension—somewhat abstracted—as the central goal of its protagonist (see attached image). In my first feature film, Zazongpari, the central arc traces the gradual armoring—or perhaps stripping away—of the human being as a spiritual entity into a cyborg existence. In its conclusion, although the technologically augmented human becomes stronger and overcomes the ghosts of the past, it also foreshadows—echoing a European, bioethically concerned transhumanist perspective—the amoral dominance of technology over the human soul.

In this work from 2004, drawn when I was 9 years old, repetition-based symmetry dominates formally, while its content depicts a conveyor-belt-like system in which human brains and hearts are being moved (or replaced). This does not reflect the libertarian, American-style wild capitalism, nor the ethically grounded European perspective, but rather evokes a form of Eastern (Chinese) transhumanism, where human existence is improved en masse and non-optionally according to the interests of state power. Surrendering control over the body to the state is risky, as we cannot know to what extent such radically prolonged life would serve our individual happiness.

Visual arts have more correlation with philosophy than medical science due to its abstract nature, so the material body centered transhumanism serves as a main idea in longevity's representation in culture since prehistoric times and antiquity. This tradition got more alive with modernity where the sci-fi genre broadened a speculative perspective on human life. As a life extensionist artist I hope that it gets less fiction and more science while time passes, so my works turn more and more documentative than predictive ehile continuing my mission.