Gallery Entry
Piety
By Erika Berger · IT
Piety is part of Posthuman Icons, an ongoing series that reinterprets Western Christian iconography through robotics, artificial intelligence, and the posthuman body. The work revisits the traditional iconography of the Pietà, replacing the human figures of mourning with synthetic beings. A mechanical body lies inert across the lap of another artificial figure, transforming an image historically associated with grief, sacrifice, and compassion into a meditation on technological mortality. Within Posthuman Icons, machines are not imagined as flawless successors to humanity. They are damaged, vulnerable, and subject to failure. In Piety, this fragility becomes emotional as well as physical. The gesture of holding and supporting the lifeless body suggests that qualities such as care, grief, attachment, and loss might persist even beyond the biological human form. The work questions the common idea of technology as a means of escaping mortality. If artificial bodies can extend human capabilities or survive beyond biological limits, they may also inherit the conditions humanity seeks to overcome: dependence, deterioration, separation, and death. By preserving the emotional structure of a sacred image while replacing its figures with machines, Piety creates a tension between technological futurity and an ancient human experience of mourning. It asks whether a posthuman future would truly leave humanity behind, or whether our machines would continue to reproduce our deepest vulnerabilities and our need to care for one another.