2_3: I EVOLVED, ERGO COGITO - HOMO SAPIENS EYE Among the innumerable biological achievements that still we don’t understand completely, there is our consciousness itself; the awareness of our being, the thinking built over the perceived image of the external world. Consciousness is natural, a powerful brain feature devised by evolutionary trial and error that improves the transmission of genes. Yet it is at the core of the artificial, this imaginary world built by humans out of observations, thoughts, words, ideas, modelling and classification of the physical world; last, a system that allows us a purpose, the planification of the future. Our consciousness should inspire us; not only to build functional “A.I.”s that can classify websites or read car licence plates; we need a living, collective understanding of what we are and how we could better build our future. Furthermore, on the practical side, the actual brain detailed functioning is still hiding some tough secrets that may provide enormous advances for the artificial computational methods. Subject: Homo sapiens eye; reflected by it, another Homo sapiens taking photos; while through the eye, it may be visible a Homo sapiens soul. Lens: Macro 90mm f/5.6 Theme 2: ONE SPECIFIC ANIMAL When thinking about nature, we picture something outside, separated from the human, artificial world made of roads, houses and cities. However we ourselves, as humans, are already inside nature, a part of it. Often artificial and natural are seen as opposite; but we are too the fruit of evolution; in our technological creations, natural materials - wood, leather, chemicals - have been and still are essentials. Our cities very well resemble very large termite nests, and we still rely critically, for the survival of the modern society, on our animal powers - reproduction, metabolism, thinking, immunity, hand-eye coordination. This series of images wish to provide technological inspiration to, and from, one specific animal: Homo sapiens. The initial plan was to take photos of technological creations - planes, ships, cranes, engines - together with their biological analogs, like seagulls, ducks, trees, inner organs; but the task revealed daunting, and seagulls really don’t want to align correctly (and dangerously) with a taking off plane. I reverted to the simpler, direct depiction of the source and maker of all artificial creations - our own human body, adult phenotype unit, between the many emerged from some billions years of evolution.