The Future of Being Human: A Conversation with Viktoria Modesta

Join us for a wide ranging conversation on art, performance, imagination, augmentation, and what it might mean to be human in a technologically advanced world with bionic pop artist Viktoria Modesta

The tl;dr for this article is very simple: Please join me for conversation with the amazing bionic pop artist, creative director, musician, and champion of future innovations Viktoria Modesta on February 29 — we’re broadcasting live online at 2:10 PM Pacific Time.

You can register (for free) by clicking the button below. But if you have a few minutes, I did want to provide a little more context!

I first met Viktoria in 2022. I was recording season 2 of the Mission: Interplanetary podcast with former astronaut and good friend Cady Coleman at the time. That season we had two episodes focused on disability in space — two episodes that I think changed my perspective of human in space more than anything else we did.

In those episodes we talked with Ann Kapusta about the first Mission:AstroAccess zero-G flight — an initiative that’s paving the way for people with physical disabilities to become an integral part of space exploration. And we had a quite inspirational conversation with Sina Bahram about his experiences on that flight.

But we didn’t have the chance to feature Viktoria, despite her being on that first flight, as well as being a mentee of Cady’s, and a huge advocate for thinking differently about the blurry line between ability and disability.

And so Cady and I reached out to her arrange an unofficial “add-on” to the podcast:

Viktoria is quite remarkable. A model and performing artist, she featured in the closing ceremony of the 2012 Summer Paralympics, was the focus of a viral music video commissioned by Channel 4 in the UK, worked with Rolls Royce on one of the most mind bending long-form ads I’ve seen, and this just scratches the surface of her artistic work.

She’s also a visionary thinker about what it means to be human in a technologically advanced world.

Viktoria is a lower leg amputee, and has embraced this in her life as a performing artist and her advocacy for thinking differently about what it means to be human — and an “able” human at that — in a world where emerging technologies have the ability to transform who and what we are.

This is what led to her participating in that first AstroAccess flight, and the subsequent interview with Cady and myself.

In that interview (you can watch the highlights above) I found Viktoria’s vision quite compelling of how technology and imagination can transform how we think about our bodies and abilities.

I was already primed for this from the podcast episodes we’d recorded. One of the messages that came through loud and clear in those was that we typically design our world for what we consider to be “able bodied” people. And how we design for space exploration is no different — yet there is absolutely no reason why we should be designing low-gravity and zero-gravity environments exclusively for people who fit neatly into world governed by gravity!

Organizations like Mission: AstroAccess and the Aurelia Institute are challenging our preconceptions of what ability and disability mean in space. And something that stuck with me from the podcast episodes was that, in zero-gravity, everyone starts from a point of “disability”. As a result, any norms we may hold dear around what an “able” astronaut is, are merely constructs of our own biases.

Our conversation with Viktoria only served to reinforce these insights. Here was someone who wanted to understand, explore, and contribute to a future of being human that embraced change and opportunity, and who was willing to throw away the constraints of conventional thinking.

Viktoria reflects this in her artistry — and also in her thinking and vision. She was a MIT Media Lab Directors Fellow in 2016, and a member of the 2019 class of Young European Leaders. More recently she’s been collaborating with the Aurelia Institute on body augmentation in microgravity through tech wearables and architectural fashion (we’ll be touching on this in the live stream).

With this combination of creativity, performance, thoughtfulness, and vision, I’m thrilled to have the chance to talk more with Viktoria on February 20 — and hope you’ll join is.

And just to leave you with a a sense of how Viktoria’s creativity, artistry and vision of the future combine, I thought I’d leave you with this 2019 extended cut of a Rolls Royce ad that features her concepts, art, and performance. Enjoy!