Manuel Beltrán

Manuel Beltrán is an artist, activist, and researcher. His artworks and projects have been widely presented in Europe and abroad. He researches and lectures on contemporary art, activism, contemporary social movements, post-digital culture and new media.

In 2015 he founded the Institute of Human Obsolescence, through which he explores the future of labour, the socio-political implications regarding our relationship with technology and the economic and governance systems surrounding the production of data. Soon our manual labour will no longer be required and with the advance of artificial intelligence, intellectual labour will be performed by machines as well. We are being replaced by machines. The Institute of Human Obsolescence explores this scenario and tries to ask questions about how to re-position the role of humans, particularly how to cope with a labour market dominated by machines. In ‘Biological Labor’ humans are hired to lay down on working stations wearing a bodysuit that transforms their body heat into electricity, which is then fed into a microcomputer that produces cryptocurrency.