I'm imagining that instead of filtering air, the headgear is actually filtering some intangible substance. Ether, or concentrated dream energy perhaps.
It's neat when art can depict something 'specifically abstractedly,' in which the device could perform a thousand different functions, all subject to the viewer.
Indeed! For me these suits represent full body condoms, which symbolize a culture that idealizes humanities total disconnection from their environment, from nature, dirt and microbes especially. The result of a long normalized perversion of cleanliness, that denies human nature and lead to strict biological isolation and permanent quarantine of each single human body. At some point it became so internalized that now the citizens of the undercity refer to their masks as their faces and consider actual faces to look weird. The alienation of mankind from nature (and how to find a way back to it) is a main theme in the Aedena cycle and one of the reasons I always found the story so fascinating.
So the design of the suits is meant to be fairly ironic, then? Interesting in the artistic sense, but terrifying in terms of what they represent?
The alienation of mankind from nature (and how to find a way back to it) is a main theme in the Aedena cycle and one of the reasons I always found the story so fascinating.
Funny, I'm kind of obsessed with that theme. It's caused a certain amount of disconnect over the years between myself and my fellow humans, in which it sometimes feels like we're different species. Anyway, I'll have to do another read-through of Aedena one of these days. I guess I was focused on other aspects last time. :S
