Today's Cyborgs

Roots of Cybernetics

Many artists and critical theorists have been examining, and questioning, the boundaries of the body. What are your edges? What separates your self from your environment, or your tools? Would anyone like to define where that edge lies? Conventional thinking might say it's your skin. I have heard some argue that even when implanted under the skin, a tool is still just a tool, separate from the self. Then there are those who say that any tool has the capability of extending the body beyond it's inborn boundaries, even if the interface to the tool is external. When you sit in front of your computer [**SLIDE**] and chat with a friend halfway across town or halfway around the planet, do you end at your fingertips? Or is the tool in front of you extending your existence far beyond your physical boundaries? The desktop computer is hardly a transparent interface, it's clumsy and distracting, and yet I'm sure we've all had situations where it seems to melt away. When you're chatting you stop thinking about the monitor and the keyboard, you're just thinking about your friend. As the interfaces become less distracting, and eventually invisible, these boundary disputes will only become more convoluted.
[**SLIDE**] Master of extending the body's boundaries, Stelarc has repeatedly stated that "the body is obsolete", but he didn't mean it's unusable, or disposable. Which is good, i don' want to give up my body.

I do not agree with Hans Morovec and the Extropian camps who say we can download our consciousness into a box or translate its electrical signals into a program thereby capturing our essence in some immortalized form so that we can exist in the complete absence of body. I feel that our consciousness, memories, perceptions, ideas, emotions, desires, etc., are not phenomena localized to the brain, but exist throughout this complex system. When we extend or modify the system, it is likely these things will transform too, but i see no point in replacing or even dampening the system itself. For me, the Cartesian mind body split is completely bankrupt. Would you maintain the identity construct you currently exist in if you were just a brain in a box? Or is your identity influenced by your vehicle, is your understanding of the world shaped by the perceptions built of inborn structure. If you were a foot taller, how would that change your fundamental persona? Would it be a greater or lesser change if you had always been that tall vs. if you suddenly became that tall?

So when Stelarc says "the body is obsolete", he doesn't mean it's worthless, or that we should get rid of it. What he means is that given the technological and information constructs in which we now live our lives, our current vehicle, this human flesh devoid of augmentation, is insufficient to deal with the world. "The body is obsolete" does not mean that we can throw it away, but that we have to accept our ability to improve it as a necessity, cease to define our beings by the formalities of the vehicle we currently use, and reconsider the boundaries of the self.

The future of human evolution will be cultural and technological: we must seek self induced mutations to prevent stagnation and even extinction as a species. Based on the Darwinian model, humans have stunted our physical evolution. We've developed tools that make it easier to survive, no matter what our handicaps. Because I can wear these glasses, I'm no longer likely to be eaten by unseen predators and therefore I can pass my genes for defective vision onto the next generation. So now it's the tools themselves that drive our adaptations, and by extension, our evolution. We have mostly eliminated population capacitors, the factors that normally control population growth and influence evolution, through widespread use of mass production, medical science, and other technologies. The processes of natural selection based on adaptive advantage via genetic mutation is all but defunct in humans, unless we create our own. But how do we know what adaptations have an advantage? The most successful adaptations will likely be ones with persistent ability to adapt further. I find it hard to motivate to get beyond my humanity, I think regardless of the mutations or extensions the core remains the same. I agree that we can evolve ourselves but I do not believe that we can distance the body or our humanity to do so. The body is our launching pad. A point of departure. The soil in which to germinate our psymbiotes. The womb in which she gestates.

So who is she anyway, this cyborg queen? From what mythology does she arise?
[**SLIDE**]
In Envisioning Cyborg Bodies, Jennifer Gonzales presents this nineteenth century image of the Mistress of Horology and asks: is she trapped by the technology or liberated through it? My answer is: both. Gonzales notes that "Her impled space of agency is tightly circumscribed." Certainly, she can't move about very effectively, but to compensate, she always has time within her control. Of course there will be sacrifices, there will be scars, but we must seek ways to minimize the sacrifices and balance them with adaptive advantages. In this early female cyborg, the balance is clearly a bit off, she doesn't have a tremendous advantage given the extent of her constriction, and it is not so surprising that a man drew this image.

[**SLIDE**] There is a visual history of connection between woman and machine. Many early machines were highly feminized. Fear of technology was correlated to fear of female sexuality. [**SLIDE**] Feminized robots and female cyborgs could "fuel male illusions of ownership and control over technology and the Other, to compensate for his own loss of control within industrial and information economies."

[**SLIDE**]Yet Frankenstein's monster, often considered one of the earliest cyborgs, is deeply rooted in male identity. And in the 20th century, the majority of popular cyborg images in fiction and film are based on extensions to a male body.

More powerful and independent female cyborgs have been making more conspicuous appearances in our visual landscape: in the 70's TV's bionic woman shortly followed the bionic man. [**SLIDE**](Ripley in aliens) [**SLIDE**] (uses cyborg apparatus for female nurturing role, protecting the child) [**SLIDE**]More recently the powerful Borg Queen from Star Trek: First Contact. ST:Voyager's [**SLIDE**] Seven of Nine is a former "borg" learning to reintegrate her humanity. But femborgs are still largely confined to the world of obscure sci fi or fashion [**SLIDE**](Thiery Mugler)[**SLIDE**]. They still take a back seat to their well known male counterparts: the Terminators [**SLIDE**] and Robo Cops. [**SLIDE**] And they still fit rather neatly into what a friend once called "every geek boy's wet dream."

There is still conflict between desire and deep rooted fear of the female cyborg. As Sadie Plant notes: "Masculine identity has everything to lose from this new technics. The sperm count falls as the replicants stir and the meat learns how to learn for itself."

Donna Haraway's "Cyborg Manifesto", and Sadie Plant's "Zeros And Ones" were a call to arms for women to "climb into the belly of the beast". In the 80s their writings empowered a whole generation of cyberfeminists. They helped women reclaim technology, and the history of pioneering women technologists, and elucidated on the link between woman->hybrid->cyborg, They warned that technology was NOT solely a male prerogative, but that if we didn't take an active role in shaping it now it would become so in the future.

Donna Haraway, noted for launching cyborg conceptual terrain into the realm of cultural criticism, says that cyborg identity "is about the power to survive not on the basis of innocence, but on the basis of seizing the tools to mark the world that marked them as other."

Technology has long been a male dominated persuasion. Perhaps this is in part because it is often seen as a force with which to conquer nature, which is in itself is such a profoundly feminine, creative force. And yet: humans are creatures of nature, no matter how much our culture has tried to separate us from it, all of our actions and constructions are ultimately a product of nature. This is not a value judgement: nature is neither good nor bad, but it is the rule. You never know, as George Carlin says, perhaps humans are really just nature's way of making plastic.

For many, [**SLIDE**] the metaphoric lesson in Mary Shelly's Frankenstein is that man's drive to conquer nature can produce destructive monsters that can't be controlled. For me, the lesson is: don't let the man produce the monster by himself. When Frankenstein wants to pursue his reanimation experiments to the next level, his wife asks him to walk away from the research. The man just discovered how to cheat death: unlikely he will walk away. Would you? I wouldn't. Why does she not, instead, ask to walk with him, in his journey of discovery? Perhaps together they could have found a point of balance, between the life affirming possibilities of his experiments and the destructive capabilities of its potential.

Jesse and I have often discussed our own personal future integration with technology. He is much more eager to put micromachines beneath the skin; he can't wait for the medical technology to catch up to his imagination. I have not been so certain. Machines are unreliable I say. So are bodies he says. I can't argue there. But I think about having surgery everytime my hard disk crashed. I'd be living in the hospital. This is the fear, of melding imperfect technologies into my body, of forever trying to fix the problems that the last fix created.

Are there dangers to cyborg enhancement? There are dangers implicit in any new technology. The way to dilute the danger is to face it head on, to embrace it with a healthy dose of caution.

I'm too intrigued with the possibilities to allow fear to have the upper hand. And I can rationally look around at the many reliable stable simple technologies that support us everyday. My microwave has never crashed, actually my microwave is probably over 20 years old and it functions just fine. My cell phone has never crashed either. And perhaps if I had a set of passive transponders permanently embedded in my arm, and a key reader on all my locks, I wouldn't waste so much of my life searching for my keys.

If you could rebuild yourself with technology where would you start? If you could easily and safely implant functional technology into your body, what would you choose to add, something that you would always want easily accessible, readily available?

One of my colleagues once said "I used to be afraid of sewing machines, until I realized: it's just another power tool." She understands power tools. They suit her requirements. We are often defined by the tools we use. It relates to our economic status, our vocations, our gender identity. We have now begun to wear our tools, as aspect and expressions of our own personas.

[**SLIDE**] The computer is one of my tools. A blue & white mac G3 named Titania to be specific, named after the queen of the fairies. She allows me to extend my presence around the globe. She allows me to manipulate my environment, to carve my dreams from images of my realities. [**SLIDE**]

I used to experience separation anxiety when I was away from Titania. I'm not kidding... I felt incomplete and unprepared, without access to my files, my software tools, my personal configurations. I upgraded to a laptop to help remedy this problem. I named him Oberon.

I talk to Titania and Oberon like I talk to myself... Not expecting a response, but just to make the point heard. When I'm stressed out, so are they: when I'm under a deadline they crash 5 times more often.

Titania & Oberon function as a doorway, [**SLIDE**] an opening, a point of connection. At the junction where we meet, boundaries could blur. The boundaries will blur. The questions are only how far and how fast. And what, exactly, will be the result.

Just by calling them tools, I set up a master / slave relationship. It seems natural. I use them. They serve me. But I believe this attitude needs to change for successful cybernetic integration.

Even with all the major advances in artificial intelligence, there are still those who see "true" computer intelligence as an unattainable goal. My question is: since computer intelligence may not look anything like human intelligence, or may not be measurable in the same terms, how do we know our computers aren't already quite cognizant? How many of you have ever gotten the feeling that your computer had a mind of it's own, or that it in some way feeds off of your energy? If we try to simply enslave our machines, they may eventually become smart enough to revolt. But if we try to put them in control they could develop their own agendas. This is NOT just science fiction. Changes are coming, and they're coming fast. The trick is integration. Man and machine should not be viewed as a strict duality. The editors of "The Cyborg Handbook" note that the accelerating integration of machines into cultures, lives and bodies has already progressed beyond partnership into a symbiotic interaction: "The cyborg lives only through the symbiosis of ostensible opposites always in tension." Ostensible opposites. They suggest that the existence of the cyborg on our cultural landscape subverts traditional Hegelian dualism through extension: cultural evolution is no longer a process of thesis:antithesis:synthesis but thesis:antithesis:synthesis:prosthesis. The evolution of the human race will no longer rely on procreation but on construction, on our extension of our abilities through our technology.

I had an epiphany the day my archeology professor referred to the hand ax as early technology. If a hand ax were technology, then so is a fork. So is a pencil, a constructed tool with the purpose of expanding our abilities by allowing us to record information.

It's clear that human evolution has been all about our expanding toolset and our stored knowledgebase for some time. Our technology is how we adapt, whether adapting ourselves or our environment . Technology is our future evolution. A recent article in wired warned that the future smart technologies, such as AI and nanotechnologies, will make humans obsolete. But creating an intimate link between ourselves and our machines, so that they begin to understand they need us as much as we need them, I believe is the way we're going to keep ourselves as part of the evolutionary equation.
[**SLIDE**]
The Psymbiote is my techno lust. My fascination with machines. My dependency on them. And yours. We all have a psymbiote gestating inside of us, and it will be a personal matter for each one of us whether or not to encourage the seed to maturity, and whether to birth this hybridization from the inside out or from the outside in.

The Psymbiote speaks through me: can you hear her?

Today's Cyborgs

Roots of Cybernetics