Performing Futures: On becoming Homo Evolutis

As humanity enters the era of self-directed evolution, the performing arts hold a unique capacity to help society sense, question, and shape what these transformations mean — not as a moral commentary but as an embodied, imaginative rehearsal of coexistence and change.

Homo Evolutis

In a series of TED talks, an American academic, bio-tech entrepreneur and futurologist Juan Enriquez proposed the term Homo Evolutis to describe a new kind of human. He said: “We are transitioning as a species. (...) I think we are transitioning into Homo Evolutis that, for better or worse, is not just a hominid that’s conscious of his or her environment; it’s a hominid that’s beginning to directly and deliberately control the evolution of its own species, of bacteria, of plants, of animals. And I think that’s such an order of magnitude change that your grandkids or your great-grandkids may be a species very different from you”.

Enriquez sketches a world where evolution is no longer driven by natural processes but by human choice. We already regulate our reproduction and can alter the genome. Our brains are undergoing a rapid transformation as we absorb, in a single day, as much information as some earlier generations did in a lifetime. Our phones and computers act as external organs, shaping memory, behaviour, and even emotion. We no longer only use technology — we live through it.

With advances in AI, robotics, genome editing, and body enhancement possibilities, the distinction between what is biological and what is artificial begins to fade. Society must learn to function within realities that evolve faster than our ethical, emotional, or cultural reflexes can adapt. The performing arts are implicated in this shift no less than science or policy. As a field, we can react to these unprecedented changes by reinterpreting and adapting them as tools for artistic expression — but we can also participate in shaping those very tools and ideas, working alongside science and technology to influence how the future itself is built.

Performing the Transhuman Condition

Discussions of transhumanism and posthumanism often swing between utopia and disaster — immortality or extinction, freedom or control. Between those extremes lies a less dramatic but more fertile space: curiosity. The performing arts can inhabit this space not to predict outcomes but to explore alternative futures — to rehearse ways of existing that are still unthinkable.

What distinguishes performance from other cultural forms is its immediacy — its insistence on lived time and reciprocal perception. It begins with an encounter: between performers and spectators, bodies and sensors, presence and mediation. In this shared moment, knowledge is not abstract but felt; it arises through attention, intuition, rhythm, and relation. Science can describe transformation, but performance lets us experience it as it happens — through embodied perception rather than analysis. From this position of lived awareness, performance can pose questions that neither science nor technology can formulate: How does a self-edited body feel from within? What happens to intimacy when touch is mediated by data? How can empathy exist between the organic and the artificial?

Performance becomes a kind of laboratory for these questions — a place where futures are rehearsed, not predicted. Yet as performance explores these frontiers, its own foundations evolve: the familiar traits of presence, embodiment, responsiveness, and exchange begin to extend into new materials, environments, and temporalities.

Embodiment and Its Extensions

If the traditional stage once centred on the expressive human body, the transhuman era challenges that body’s stability. Stelarc famously declared that the body is obsolete — not as a provocation against humanity, but as a recognition that its boundaries are no longer fixed. What performance now exposes is not the disappearance of the body, but its reconfiguration: its ability to merge with systems, data, and other forms of life. Artists such as Stelarc, Neil Harbisson, and Moon Ribas have long explored the shifting boundary between human and machine. Stelarc’s Ear on Arm and Fractal Flesh distributed agency between body, network, and code, revealing control as a shared process rather than an individual property. When Stelarc connected his nervous system to online audiences who could trigger his movements remotely, the act became a live experiment in trust and vulnerability — a physical demonstration that agency can be shared, even surrendered. Harbisson’s antenna, implanted in his skull to translate colour into sound, extends perception into new sensory dimensions, transforming biology into an interface. Moon Ribas’s seismic sensor, implanted in her foot to feel global earthquakes in real time, transforms the planet’s movements into choreography — a literal dance between body and Earth. These are not eccentric spectacles but research acts that expose the plasticity of embodiment — how movement, perception, and identity can migrate between biological and technological systems.

For artists working across performance today, this raises a broader question about agency: who or what performs, and who or what is being performed through? The performer is no longer the sole origin of expression but part of a distributed system of action that includes sensors, sound, software, and audience. Motion capture, responsive architecture, and virtual environments extend performance into zones where gesture, image, and algorithm constantly reshape one another. This shift does not erase the performer, but rather multiplies their presence. The stage becomes a field of negotiation where embodiment unfolds across different scales — through several coexisting bodies and systems at once.

Mediated Intimacy

As new technologies become part of how we move, see, and communicate, the line between body and machine grows thinner. What used to feel like distance — a screen, a headset, a sensor — now becomes a space of contact. In performance, this means that presence no longer depends on two bodies sharing the same room, but on how attention and response travel between them. A pulse of light, a vibration from a wearable device, or a shift in spatial sound can feel as intimate as a touch. Digital tools no longer only extend the body; they also invite new kinds of closeness.

The philosopher and performer Susan Kozel explores this change in her book Closer: Performance, Technologies, Phenomenology. She writes about how technology shapes the way we sense each other and the world, and how performance can help us notice these subtle transformations. When gestures, breath, or emotion pass through sensors or screens, they do not disappear — they return to us differently, slightly delayed or distorted, and in that difference we discover new ways of feeling.

In many digital performances or virtual reality works, these small distortions — a moment of lag, a glitch, a delay between movement and response — become part of the choreography. They remind us that connection is not just about smooth communication, but about learning to stay present within imperfection. Kozel suggests that the digital does not remove intimacy; it teaches us to tune in differently. Seen this way, virtual and physical experiences belong to the same continuum. One amplifies the other. The digital heightens perception; the physical anchors it. Performance makes this relationship tangible. It shows that intimacy is not only a matter of bodies touching but of attention shared — a quality of awareness that can exist between humans, technologies, and environments alike.

Rehearsal for Coexistence

As performance intertwines with data, biology, and machine intelligence, the question inevitably turns to how we live with what we make. Speculating about future bodies is never neutral. Each narrative of enhancement or evolution carries implicit politics: whose version of the human is being advanced, who defines progress, and who is excluded from the design. Because shaping the future always implies exclusion, we must imagine futures where many kinds of life coexist — not a single perfected one. Anthropologists remind us that the singularity of Homo sapiens is an anomaly: for most of prehistory, several human species coexisted, exchanging tools, genes, and gestures. Transhumanism may, paradoxically, bring us back to such multiplicity — where biological, hybrid, robotic, and virtual bodies share space, perception, and agency. In that sense, the future may not abolish difference but amplify it. Here performance becomes essential. On stage, coexistence can be made perceptible and felt — not through moral argument but through experience. The performing arts offer a space to rehearse communication and empathy across divergent bodies, temporalities, and intelligences. They allow us to sense how the relation itself might evolve. To imagine Homo Evolutis in performance is not to predict the future but to practise critical empathy with it.

Collaboration between artists, scientists, and technologists then becomes more than an exchange of expertise — it becomes a shared inquiry into responsibility. Both rehearsal and laboratory operate on iteration: testing, observing, adjusting. But artists bring an additional capacity — an ethics of uncertainty that resists premature closure. They hold space for not-knowing, allowing discovery to remain open-ended. In a world where evolution is increasingly designed, such openness is not weakness; it is a method. Performance does not offer dystopian warnings or utopian promises but it invites us to experience transformation while remaining connected to one another.

If Homo Evolutis describes a species capable of rewriting its own biology, the performing arts describe the practice through which that species might learn to live with its inventions. They do not answer the future but make it perceptible. Through movement, touch, and imagination, they keep evolution humanly negotiable — ensuring that whatever we become, we remain able to feel it.

References: Enriquez, Juan (2007-2021) TED talks. Available here
(Accessed: 20 October 2025).
Kozel, Susan (2007) Closer: Performance, Technologies, Phenomenology. Cambridge, Mass., and London: The MIT Press.