Think Positive Engineered Species

Vincent Fournier Engineered species photography art time magazine

TREEHOPPER [Curculionidae botulus] Pollutant-sensitive insect

French artist Vincent Fournier is a futurist. His photography explores otherworldly environments, touched by the hand of man. Machinery, robots and the seemingly limitless development of science and technology are depicted in a sort of visual science fiction, framed in an idealised state of illusory, mechanical utopia. Robots and NASA space stations and goverment astronomic centres – including the Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Centre, the Mars Desert Research Station in Utah and the Atacama Desert Observatories in Chile – have all the been the subjects of his past work.

In a new direction for the artist – but not entirely a diversion – Fournier turns to animals, reimagined in a hyper state of survival. Taking taxidermy samples, each specimen was accessed by an animal geneticist to observe the processes of evolution each species had developed. From there, Fournier imagined the future of their evolutionary development, transforming each into super animal beings – a pangolin resistant to climate change, a drought- and frost-resistant Ibis, an intelligent rabbit, edible orchids and a pollutant-sensitive treehopper insect.