In our technologically accelerated capitalist society, algorithms reduce the human body to an exchangeable module within the global workflow. In Gesture and Speech, André Leroi-Gourhan defines humanity by upright bipedal posture. However, he also foresaw that the advance of automation would eventually force us "to cease being Sapiens and to become something else."

CHIMERIA is an experimental bodily practice that, through a twisting appropriation of technology, dismantles the body schema of Homo sapiens and enables its rebirth as a new life form: the Chimera.

Using a head-mounted display, we "transplant" the human eye—the principal input terminal of capitalist labor and consumption—onto other parts of the body. When we begin to see with our toes, for instance, our feet become the head, our buttocks become the shoulders, and our arms become the hind legs. The existing body schema is dismantled at its root.

The volunteers who seek a new body were recruited through a publicly circulated phone number, and they took part in an intensive communal life in metropolitan Tokyo. Chairs, doorknobs, staircases, and every affordance of the environment, all designed for "humans with eyes in their heads," rejected them. In order to survive, they reconstructed their own norms: ingesting liquid food through tubes, employing wire-driven prosthetics, and developing a toilet for urinating from a kneeling posture. At the heart of the anthropocentric urban space, they established their own Chimera-centric domain.

While this domain was open to outsiders, anyone who wished to observe its ecology had to imitate the environment and become part of it. There, the established "normal" social system was no longer absolute. From the Chimera's perspective, it is the upright biped human who is relativized as a "strange creature."

CHIMERIA is a quiet revolution against capitalist productivity and the principle of biological selection. It demonstrates that the body and the system we believe to be absolute can be readily dismantled by remarkably simple technology. In doing so, this practice brings into being a temporary yet undeniable other world. This other world would "demote" the reality we understand as singular and absolute, turning it into one of the countless possible realities.

Project lead & concept: Shin Hanagata
Chimeric volunteers: Mio (Moe Yoshida), Sakaguchi (Tomoaki Sakaguchi), Yoshida (Kona Eguchi), Kumo (Yusaku Endo), Igarashi (Chihiro Igarashi), Haga (Haga Nanaha), Shikaya (Shin Hanagata)
Environment fabrication: Takuto Ohta
Design ethnographer: Shin Aoyama
Cinematography and documentation: Takahiro Ueno
Curator: Tomohito Wakui
Art direction: Arata Nagara
Hardware engineering: Shin Hanagata
Suit fabrication: Karu Miyoshi
Enclosure fabrication: Juri Fujii
Production support: Keiichi Hayashi
Web development: Shin Hanagata
Special thanks to: Izumi Enaga, Funimu Someya
With support from: The Project to Support Emerging Media Arts Creators, Agency for Cultural Affairs;
Arts Council Tokyo; KUMA Foundation

Shin Hanagata (JP), born in Tokyo in 1995, works across performance, media art, and contemporary art. As the "self" and "human" grow unstable in a technologically accelerated capitalist society, he turns to technologies that rewire the body's relation to the world—wearable devices, prosthetics, generative AI—enacting a contemporary "twisting of humanity". Selected presentations include at the Autumn Meteorite Performing Arts Festival (Tokyo Metropolitan Theater, 2025), MOT ANNUAL (Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, 2023), and Taipei Arts Festival (Taipei Performing Arts Center, 2023).

In CHIMERIA, Shin Hanagata proposes a radical environment in which the standardized human body is dismantled and reorganized through technological mutation. Using HMD devices that relocate vision to other parts of the body, participants abandon familiar bodily orientation and develop new relationships to movement, perception, architecture, and social interaction. Recruited through public calls, “volunteers” inhabited a Tokyo residence where everyday infrastructures designed for upright humans became unusable, forcing them to collectively adapt to entirely new bodily conditions. What emerges is an autonomous “Chimera-centric” habitat built for bodies that no longer conform to normative human design. The jury recognized in Hanagata’s work a bold and uncompromising form of interactive art that resists technologically and economically optimized notions of the human. Through what he describes as “Twisting”—a rewiring of anatomy and sensorium—CHIMERIA powerfully challenges anthropocentric assumptions embedded within contemporary infrastructures, interfaces, and systems of productivity. Rather than enhancing the human, Hanagata opens an unsettling space for imagining other forms of embodiment, sociality, and life.