Most of the photos in Nolte’s series Corpus 2.0 display alterations that humans might employ to adapt to the current world and the experiences of our daily lives. For example, the above photo suggests placing an extra joint in your thumb for improved SMS messaging. The photos illustrate a possible form of elective evolution that, rather than ensuring our survival, is meant to increase our efficiency within the world as it exists and allow us to continue to modify ourselves as the world changes.

A hole in the lip for smokers.

An ear designed to fit a universal earbud.

A nose ridge to ensure that glasses stay put.

An elongated should for cradling a phone.

The above image in particular, which depicts a high-heeled foot, hits home the fact that many people already adapt their bodies to current fashion – through implants and tummy tucks – and cultural mores, as with circumcision. The next step in body modification could well be to change the structure of our bodies to better interface with the objects in our space.

[Marcia Nolte via Dezeen]

1. Heart valves. We haven't got a replacement for your heart yet — though a lot of people are researching it — but you can replace your heart valves with artificial ones like those manufactured by ATS Medical. These simple-looking device are fitted to your heart, opening and closing with each beat of your heart to push the blood through your body. Without heart valves, your heart has to work much harder to pump and will grow enlarged — generally a condition that leads to death. Many people are born without a heart valve, or lose one in a heart attack. They can also be replaced by heart valves from a dead human or pig.

2. Bladder. Tissue engineers have successfully grown bladders from human bladder cells, then transplanted them back into the patients whose malformed or damaged bladders provided the cell samples. Several people have received these synthetic biological bladders since 2006. They are beta bladders, and the patients aren't always continent. But now they have full-sized bladders when they didn't before, and that dramatically improves quality of life. So you can survive if you lose your bladder — just as long as you've got a few bladder cells left for tissue engineers to grow you a new one.

3. Large intestine. Many people with colitis — an immuno-deficiency disease that causes inflammation and tearing of the colon — have colectomies to remove the entire organ. But that doesn't mean they have to wear a colostomy bag. Surgeons can use a section of the small intestine to create a J-shaped pouch inside your body that acts as a surrogate colon. It's not as big as your large intestine was, so you have to visit the bathroom a bit more often. But you don't have to wear a bag, and you're surviving just fine with no colon at all.

4. Stomach. Like your large intestine, your stomach can be completely removed. Usually this is done when you have stomach cancer. The esophagus (the pipe that routes food from your mouth to your stomach) is rerouted to connect to your small intestine, and the surgeon can widen the small intestine in that area to create a surrogate stomach. Food goes through the same digestive process as before, but you can't absorb as much vitamin B12. So you may have to get bi-annual injections of the vitamin. 5. Kidneys. You've probably heard about kidney dialysis, where people with kidneys that don't function get stuck in a giant machine that de-toxifies their blood for hours. It's a crappy process, but it does mean that you can live without a kidney. The good news, though, is that there is now a wearable dialysis device, pictured above, which you put on your body like a belt. It doesn't work quite as well as dialysis, but it does the trick and many patients prefer it to the weekly dialysis clinic visit. We've written about the kidney dialysis wearable, and heart valves, before.

Top image "The Food" from artist Jeanne Dunning.

Ellis writes:

I have given this place over to a crack team of mental patients with the brief to discover and present The Future — particularly the "future" of DOKTOR SLEEPLESS and grinder culture — wherever it lays, in potential, in the soil of The Present. I said to them: "Imagine: you want to be a superconnected, modified, new kind of human, and you consider your own body to be a work in progress, so you're constantly looking for new things you can do to yourself (and others) while also keeping an eye on the collapsing planet around you because you want to have enough time to finish your body (or wish to use your many communications-technology devices to record it all as it collapses around your ears)."

Plus, there's the whole cost issue. 4k to 7k, or this for a mere $20.71? Or you could pick up a Sharpie for about $1.50 and just draw the lines on yourself. Either way, you do the math.

If men start going through with this upgrade, you have to wonder... will women start checking out the gut and asking their friends, "Hey, see that hottie the bar? Think they're fake?"

Only time will tell.

Six-Pack Surgery, From Puffy To Buff [WSJ]