Indian dancers making limbs that feel, nature restarting with plastic bottles, and M.I.A. meets her cyborg match. A/V to amaze you

Here’s our occasional short-film bath, for a weekend’s meaningful stimulation and inspiration. This week’s has a post-human, post-natural theme about it.

Above is a short from Aeon, on how an Indian dancer (and MIT engineer) is using her sensibility to make prosthetics that feel:

As a biomedical engineer and a practitioner of the Indian classical dance form bharatanatyam, Shriya Srinivasan understands the value of being able to sense the world around you with your entire body.

Working at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Srinivasan has been part of a team dedicated to creating the next generation of prosthetics limbs, which owners use not only to move, but also to receive sensory feedback.

With these emerging surgically attached robotic protheses and exoskeletons, which integrate the signals of muscle tissues and electrodes, Srinivasan and her fellow researchers aim to help those with amputations or paralysis to feel more fully.

From Vimeo Staff Picks:

This speculative animated film takes place on Earth in a distant future. It offers glimpses into how life forms adapt to a new planetary ecology. New species exploit a degrading layer of the planet’s crust by digging, foraging, and designing new homes. What is toxic for one species is a perfect habitat for another. Among the remnants of the Anthropocene, life moves. Made by Wang & Söderström

Something of a cautionary tale from the musician M.I.A., in the video for her song ‘Popular’, where the star seems to be having trouble with her android double at a casting session, at some unspecified future date. Blur below from Creative Review (who include this in their list of best 2022 music videos - worth checking out)

Helmed by French director Arnaud Bresson, the cinematography is stark and stripped back; and the theme seems to be warning of a dystopian future (or perhaps present) in which the robots have well and truly taken over. Where the video feels smart is in its no frills approach: there’s pretty much one character, one setting and just a few fixed frames, yet a sense of tension carries the whole thing and keeps the viewer more than engaged right through to the bleakly comic denouement.

***

Any suggestions for the next instalment? Please do mail us.