SYMBIÓLIS

What might beauty look like in the future? What happens when our ideals of beauty begin to take on evolutionary traits? The project traces beauty back to its evolutionary roots and explores what it might become in the future - a world where beauty standards continue to change, while the pressure to live up to them remains. SYMBIÓLIS is an interactive installation that imagines a futuristic biological beauty clinic. Each visitor undergoes a personalized diagnostic process involving facial photography, scanning, and a questionnaire. Based on the results, the system creates their ideal self as a human-animal hybrid - an evolved version of their own body that combines animal traits with human features. The result is a synthesis of human beauty standards and the beauty, efficiency, and evolutionary adaptations found in nature. The diagnosis consists of ten questions exploring everyday behavior, social interactions, self-perception, and instinct. Each question is linked to an evolutionary trait found in one of ten different animals. The visitor’s answers determine which of these traits become part of their hybrid body. In nature, physical traits can signal health, survival, efficiency, and genetic fitness. The hybrid may not fit our idea of beauty today, but could it become a beauty ideal in the future? What if beauty were no longer judged only by appearance, but by what our appearance reveals about what lies beneath? And how far would we be willing to go to become the ideal version of ourselves?