Meet Lucy McRae | Sci Fi Artist, Body Architect, visting Professor at SCI_Arc

We had the good fortune of connecting with Lucy McRae and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Lucy, how do you think about risk?
RISK TO INNOVATE. Risk, vulnerability and openness to the unknown have been a cornerstone to my growth and career path. If I have known the risks and compromises involved to getting to Now, I would have steered clear – not knowing is uneasy, but the outcomes are far more reaching.

Let’s talk shop? Tell us more about your career, what can you share with our community?
I call myself a body architect. Body Architect is a made up title that won a dream job fifteen years ago. The slippery term still follows me around, invariably provoking the question: “what’s that”? The TED Fellows director suggested ‘Science Fiction artist’ after a heart-to-heart about feeling misunderstood. To conserve the energy it takes to explain the ins and outs of what I do, I say to most I’m an artist, creating scientific “what if’s” in the form of film, photography, future products and immersive installation as ways of asking the public, ‘do we want this’? –– Not solutions, but science-fact worlds that question the future.
I downloaded the ‘Body Architect’ title during a blurry Post-It note and wine session with Clive van Heerden, the director of a far future design research lab at consumer electronics giant, Philips. It was packageable enough to win me that job at Philips.
We were a small interdisciplinary group of oustiders at Philips; fashion designer, social scientist, engineer, tailor, product and innovation designer. We spent four years developing Electronic Tattoos, Emotional Sensing Jewelry and various other wearable tech like Bubbelle, which was the winner of Time Magazine’s fashion invention award in 2007. The purpose of our team, called Probes, was to develop cutting-edge prototypes for technologies that could sense human emotion, to develop a ‘maybe tech’ that moves away from purely rational devices toward future tech that blushes, shivers, frets or arouses, like we do.
I’ve come to learn, my work and role is that of an interpreter –– using my body as a barometer, feeling for subtle signs of change, for small and slow deviations from convention. At Philips this method for predicting the future was called “weak signaling’. Interpreting strange variations at the edges of culture and translating these into art.

Any places to eat or things to do that you can share with our readers? If they have a friend visiting town, what are some spots they could take them to?
Korean Spa to defrag; El Porto for waves;
Hike in the Angeles forest;
Coffee at “Eightfold”;
Dinner at “La Sita” in China town;
Sushi at “Kazu Nori”
Drinks with wonderful friends Amiee Byrne (Ceramicist) and Scottie Cameron (Director)

Shoutout is all about shouting out others who you feel deserve additional recognition and exposure. Who would you like to shoutout?
Endurance: Shackleton’s Incredible Voyage, the book by Alfred Lansing

AND

My team, commissioners, friends, family and the ocean

Website: www.lucymcrae.net

Instagram: @lucymcrae

Linkedin: Lucy Mcrae

Image Credits
Photography Scottie Cameron, Ariel Fisher, Brian Overend