The human body and the artificial.
Technology has made its way into every aspect of our lives including language. Expressions like “my mind is broken” or “my knees are rusty” in English or ‘ Tkissirt’ in Maltese, summarise how frequently the organic is represented through properties that are usually associated with machines, that is the artificial.
Medical technological advancements are enabling organ transplants, blood transfusion and artificially inseminated birth. This Circling of flesh thanks to these developments has enabled the human body to blurr the lines of his destiny and death.
Technology is also allowing us to change vision and perception. Filters on social media are enabling us to change in real time the way we look to another person on the other side of the screen. With video messaging we have managed to change the meaning of distance and placement of the individual.
We indeed are walking towards becoming one with the artificial.
An artist who has been questioning the extension of the human body through technology since the 80’s is Stelarc. His work radically addressed the technicities of the human body. His projects and performances deal with the extension and improvement of the human body as a hollow and unconscious container. On one level his work can be understood as a technical project that reduces the human body to its technically relevant functions and would thus form radical continuation of the principles of scientific management on another level but by negating the humanistic question his art critically asks what it means to be human and weather that humanness has a particular site in the physical body(Broeckmann 2016)
Taking in consideration the fact the our bodies will be augmented by technology, in 1992, Stelarc created ‘The third Hand’, the first of his works to act as an attachment to his body. He even managed to learn how to write 2 words evolution and decadence with the three hands together.
He also made a performance where his third hand was attached. Laser beams were directed to his eyes using optic fibre cables. These laser beams pulsed to the sound of his heartbeat sound. By controlling the movements of the muscles of the eyes, he could scribble letters in the space with the laser beams. This changed the passive status of eyes as receptors of light and images to image generators in the space.
Broeckmann, Andreas. Machine Art in the Twentieth Century. The MIT Press, 2016.
Zombies, Cyborgs & Chimeras: A Talk by Performance Artist, Prof Stelarc
